


by the light of all your bridges burning

by branwyn



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Brian Banner's A+ Parenting, Gen, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Suicidal Ideation, Suicide Attempts, takes place between Iron Man 3 and Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-27
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-07-10 11:34:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 39,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6983254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/branwyn/pseuds/branwyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce Banner is twelve years old. It's not an easy age. For anyone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings throughout the story for references to child abuse.

When Bruce wakes up, he’s lying on a cold tile floor. The light is too bright. He keeps his eyes shut.

Everything hurts, kind of like he got knocked down the stairs or came down with the flu. It makes him want to stay very still. Sometimes, if he holds still, it’s over sooner.

Where is he, anyway?

Last thing he remembers was entering the command sequence. For a split-second Bruce thought it was going to work, because the air all around the machine had looked weird—thick, like it was taking on density—and then there had been a noise like a lot of people talking really fast all at once, but from a long way away.

He wouldn’t feel like this, though, if it had worked. Maybe the machine had blown up. Maybe it had created an energy pulse that had knocked him off his feet. He doesn’t smell anything burning, so it was probably that. Is there something wet under his face? Maybe there _was_ a fire and it had set off the sprinklers and destroyed the whole lab—Dad’s work would be ruined, he’d probably lose his job, and he was going to _kill_ Bruce—

Unless Dad had already been here. Maybe he came back to the lab after Bruce left the house and caught him where he wasn’t supposed to be. Bruce knew there was a risk of that, going in, but he’d made up his mind to do it anyway.

He doesn’t remember his father walking in on him, but he doesn’t always remember, when he first wakes up. 

On the other hand, the room is really quiet. He hears a faint beeping at intervals and the hum of the fans in the air ducts, but no pacing footsteps, no low, angry muttering. And it wouldn’t be like Dad to just leave Bruce lying here; he’d be yelling at him to _get on your feet, don’t act like a martyr, your mother’s not here to be impressed._

It feels like he’s alone. Which means maybe he can still make it out, clean things up a little, cover his tracks. Riding his bike all the way to the house is going to hurt like crazy, but he’s done it before.

There’s a chance that he’ll get caught sneaking back in. But Bruce always gets in trouble no matter what he does. So just once, he’d decided to do what he wanted. Because if it had _worked…_

Bruce opens his eyes, just a crack, and starts feeling around for his glasses.

The first thing he sees when his vision comes into focus is the blood all over the floor. It’s on his clothes too. Now that he thinks about it, his nose feels swollen and sore, and when he touches it his fingers come away red. That’s fine, though. He’s had bloody noses plenty of times. He’ll clean it up before he goes, and it’ll be fine.

Then Bruce looks around and—no. It’s not fine at all.

This isn’t Dad’s lab at the university. This isn’t a lab he’s ever seen before.

The work benches are laid out differently. The lighting isn’t the same. There are machines he doesn’t recognize, and there are huge glass screens everywhere, like windows that don’t look out onto anything.

Stiffly, Bruce gets to his feet.

He’s standing in the middle of a workstation of some kind, a semi-circle of equipment and desks. A stack of folders and journals and a few stained coffee mugs sit next to a strange flat keyboard. Tacked up on the wall over the desk is a diagram of…something, and a few pages containing handwritten equations. Bruce takes a step closer—it looks like figures for space-time mathematics. That isn’t Dad’s field, but Bruce is more interested in particle physics anyway; he’s read all of Einstein’s papers. A little square of pink paper is stuck to the diagram: written in what looks like a girl’s loopy handwriting, it says _Let’s call it the Fanner Paradox_. There’s a smiley face at the end of the sentence.

Next to the keyboard is a small glass box containing a rock. It’s black, about the size of a grown man’s fist, with silver striations, and veins of some kind of purple crystal. He doesn’t recognize it, but he doesn’t know much about geology.

Hesitantly, Bruce reaches for the keyboard. Then he stops, his hand hovering; what if he sets off some kind of alarm? The technology here is too advanced, it has to be top secret. This is probably some kind of military research installation. Dad…he doesn’t really talk about his work at home anymore, but for a few years he’d been trying really hard to get a job with the government. What if this is his real job now, and his work at the college is just a cover?

Somehow, even if Bruce had knocked himself out when he activated the machine, he can’t see his father finding him, carrying him here, and then leaving him. _Especially_ not if he’s been keeping secrets like that. But who else would bring him here?

Bruce needs to leave; he needs to run, fast, before he gets caught, before he gets _arrested_. But he can’t stop staring at the equipment, at the equations; he wants to sit down and go through those notebooks and folders, he wants to _know_ everything he’s not allowed to know. He can’t help himself, even though he gets into a lot of trouble that way.

He’s still just standing there like some kind of moron when the door at the back of the lab bursts open and two of the hugest guys Bruce has ever seen in his life come striding in.

Both of them are just incredibly tall, and blonde, with muscles like body-builders, and they aren’t wearing uniforms but they carry themselves like soldiers, not scientists. At least, the one with short hair looks like a soldier; his friend has long hair and a beard, like a biker or something. 

“Dr. Banner, we are bid to fetch you for dinner,” the biker says. “You must—ah. He has departed.”

The soldier shakes his head. “Natasha was pretty sure that he hadn’t left the lab since last night. He’s probably passed out at his desk.”

“Then you had best wake him gently.”

“Yeah, I hear he’s a beast when he hasn’t…oh.”

Bruce had started backing away as soon as the door opened, but it’s too late. The soldier is looking right at him. He looks really familiar, like maybe Bruce has seen him on TV. Except he knows Bruce’s dad apparently, so maybe they’ve met before.

That’s it, then. Bruce is in for it now. 

“Um, excuse me,” says the soldier, and then the biker is looking at Bruce too, blinking with big eyes and a confused expression.

There’s no way out now that they’ve seen him, and they don’t look angry yet, so Bruce steps forward and lifts his chin. 

“Where’s my father?” he says, flat and cold.

The soldier’s eyes get really big. “Your father?”

“Dr. _Banner_. You just said his name.”

His mouth falls open. The biker turns to him, frowning. “I thought he was without relations,” he says, quietly, like he thinks Bruce won’t hear.

It wouldn’t be that surprising, actually, if Dad just never talked about him at work. He’s ashamed of Bruce, he always has been. 

The soldier hasn’t take his eyes off Bruce. “I don’t know where Dr. Banner is,” he says slowly. “We thought he was in here. Can I ask your name?”

“Robert,” says Bruce, just in case. As if there’s still a prayer of him getting out of this mess.

“This is Thor,” says the soldier. “And I’m Steve Rogers.”

Bruce’s heart begins to beat so hard that it sends tremors through his whole body.

Obviously, he’d hit his head harder than he realized. He’s got some kind of brain damage; he’s hallucinating. _Captain America_ is standing right across the room from him.

He _knew_ he recognized the guy from somewhere.

Captain America—Steve _Rogers_ —taps his nose. “You’ve got, uh. On your face.”

Bruce winces. He’d forgotten that he was covered in blood. He must look like some kind of head case.

“You okay?” Captain America says.

“I’m fine,” Bruce snaps. 

“Who blacked your eye, young Robert?” says Thor.

Bruce’s face gets hot. He’d had the black eye since last week. It didn’t have anything to do with…whatever this is. Thor looks like he’s waiting for an answer, though, so Bruce just looks away.

There’s a door in the wall to the left of him. Bruce knows better than to think he can outrun a freaking _super-soldier_ , but Rogers is on the other end of the room.

He has to get out of here. He can make it; he just needs a distraction.

“I’m not stupid, you know,” he tells them, in that same flat voice. His mom hates it when he talks that way, but it gets him what he needs sometimes; people don’t expect it from someone his age. “I know what this is about.”

Thor lifts an eyebrow. “Pray enlighten us.”

“You’re experiments.” As soon as Bruce says it, he believes it. “My dad is working on some kind of secret project to recreate the super-soldier program. You’re a clone,” he jerks his head at Rogers, “They used you to reproduce the serum, then they gave it to him. They’re making a whole army, and you’re the prototypes.”

Thor chuckles, and Rogers gives him a quick, disapproving look. 

“I’m not an experiment,” he says. “At least, not recently. And Thor isn’t a super-solder. He’s—well, he just looks like that.”

Rogers sounds like he’s trying to be reassuring, but he looks kind of like he’s trying not to laugh, too.

They’re lying, obviously. They’re lying, and they’re making fun of him, and just like that, Bruce is _furious_.

“You’re strong, but you’re not very bright, are you?” he sneers. “They left intelligence augmentation out of the original experiment. I bet they’re trying to fix that this time around. Give you guys big brains to match your big muscles.” Suddenly, Bruce feels cold. “Is that—that’s it, isn’t it. That’s why my father brought me here. So you can study me. You’re going to experiment on _me_.”

Neither Thor nor Rogers are smiling anymore. They look very serious, very—cold. 

Dread coils around Bruce’s heart and squeezes. 

Everything makes a sick, horrible kind of sense now. Bruce is smart—too smart. Dad used to talk all the time about dissecting him so scientists could study his brain, figure out what was wrong him. He doesn’t talk that way anymore—he hardly talks to Bruce at all these days, unless he’s mad at him. But he’d been trying to get a job with the government for a long time, and maybe he told them—maybe, in exchange, he offered—

“Robert.” Somehow, without Bruce noticing, Rovers has managed get a lot closer to him. Just a couple more feet and he’ll be close enough to grab him. “Hey. It’s okay. Don’t get upset.”

Only when Rogers says this does Bruce realize that his breathing has gotten kind of fast and heavy, like he’s about to cry. He’s not going to cry. He’s twelve, he’s not a _child_.

“I think we’re all a little confused,” Rogers goes on. “Let me take you downstairs. We can talk to some people, figure this out—”

“You must not fear us,” says Thor, and now he’s walking forward, too. Standing together like that, they make a solid wall of muscle, filing in the space between the lab benches. Bruce is never going to make it past them. That’s probably the point. They’ve probably got orders to keep Bruce in the room until someone shows up to drug him and take him away.

“I promise no one’s going to hurt you,” says Rogers. “Just—give us a minute, we’ll figure out what’s happening.”

Bruce thinks about the dull ache in his arms and legs and the way his chest is tight and his whole body is humming with tension. He’d been completely exhausted when he first woke up but he’s not tired anymore. He can run if he needs to. Captain America is faster than him, but Bruce is really good at hiding. He just has to get out of the room. He’ll be okay once he gets out of the room. 

He takes a step back and stumbles over a chair on wheels. Spinning, he pushes the chair out in front of him. He’s almost to the door.

“JARVIS,” says Rogers, “tell Tony he needs to get back here, now.”

“He is on his way from the airport, Captain,” says a voice from out of nowhere. There must be speakers hidden in the ceiling—someone must be watching them. “I alerted him as soon as Dr. Banner transformed into his current state.”

“ _Transformed_?” says Rogers, in a high, sharp voice.

He’s distracted. He and Thor are looking at each other. Bruce reaches behind him, finding the door handle. It’s not locked.

Thor shouts his name, but he’s too late. Bruce throws the door open and runs.

 

*

Tony is having a really shitty day.

Rhodey had been badgering him from weeks to come down to D.C. and take some meetings; Tony hates politicians, but then Pepper had climbed on the nag-wagon, and next thing he knew he was having lunch with the chairman of the Defense committee, a guy who once voted for Ross Perot and currently smells like old cheese. 

It had taken heroic, nay, _super_ -heroic restraint not to show up to the meeting already drunk. Afterwards there’d been a delay at takeoff, and then the second the fucking jet was in the air, he’d got the alert about the fucking catastrophe taking place in his lab.

Apparently, Bruce is having an even worse day than he is. If Bruce wasn’t one of the very few people on earth whose welfare Tony prioritizes over his own, he could almost resent him for that.

Now Steve is on the phone talking some kind of bullshit, and Tony’s stuck in Manhattan traffic where he can’t _do_ anything about it, and any second now he’s going to start chewing the upholstery. Any. Goddamn. Second.

“What do you mean, you lost him?” Tony snaps at his phone. “I get that Banner’s an Olympic gold medalist in escape and evasion, but he’s a _kid_. Aren’t his legs, you know, a lot shorter?”

Steve grimaces at him over the video. “Thor and I went after him, but we…stopped. Tony, he thinks he’s some kind of prisoner here. I didn’t have the heart to chase him into a corner. Besides, JARVIS said he was taking care of it.”

“JARVIS?” Tony catches Happy’s eye in the mirror and motions to him: _step on it_. Happy rolls his eyes, but they advance through traffic a fraction of a degree more quickly than before.

“Dr. Banner has not left the Tower,” JARVIS reports, where Tony and Steve can both hear. “He has reached the private elevator and appears to be selecting floors at random. I can override the controls and send him to a secure location, if you wish.”

“Yes, I do. I wish that. Stick him the penthouse, then put it on lockdown.”

“Tony.” Steve sound grim. “What if he can still transform?”

“I dunno, Cap.” Tony bares his teeth at the phone. “Think you can take a pint-sized Hulk?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out.”

“Me neither, which is why JARVIS isn’t sending him to the containment room.”

“But if he—”

“If Bruce thinks he’s a prisoner, sticking him in containment is only going to prove him right. Hulk— _grown-up_ Hulk—knows it’s full of recreational smashing opportunities, but to a kid who doesn’t know better it’s just going to look like a cage.” Happy tapped on the headrest and held up a few fingers. “We’re about three minutes out, Steve, just hold tight and tell Sir Galahad to get Foster on the line.”

“Fine, Tony. Just…”

“What?”

“How did this happen? Was it something he was working on?”

“How the fuck should I know? His parents snubbed the wrong fairy at his christening or something. You could break the bank betting on Banner’s bad luck.” Tony clamps down on the dread roiling in his stomach. “Just hold the fort till I get there.”

He wasn’t going to admit it to Steve, but he doesn’t have the first clue what Bruce is working on these days. They’d worked shoulder to shoulder for a couple of months after Bruce moved in, but then Bruce started getting withdrawn, kind of squirrelly, even for him. Tony hadn’t wanted to spook him by pressing the issue. 

The thing is, Bruce is a little smarter than he is. Not in a way most people would notice: Bruce is a theoretician and Tony is an experimentalist. To the layman, the work Tony does is easier to grasp, easier to praise. But Tony knows the difference between them. 

Tony is tethered to the earth, to fire and metal and percussive force. Bruce, on the other hand, has one foot in the ether. He’ll chase a theory so far into the abstract that Tony doesn’t even dare try to follow.

But apparently, he’s got no choice but to try.

Just. If Bruce _had_ to be a child, why did he have to be, according to JARVIS’s estimate, _twelve_?

There’s no such thing as a happy, well-adjusted twelve year old. Tony would know.


	2. Chapter 2

Tony makes it back to the Tower and up to the penthouse about twenty seconds before Bruce bursts through the door.

“Holy shit,” Tony blurts out, and the kid— _Bruce_ —gives him a wild look, then doubles back, only to find the door locked. He rattles the handle for a second, then turns around, pressing his back flat to the wall. He looks hunted; worse, he looks like he’s used to getting caught.

If he hadn’t been forewarned, Tony would never have recognized him.

It isn’t just that the kid version of Bruce is undersized and painfully thin (although that too—Tony would never have pegged him as old as twelve if JARVIS hadn’t been confident). It isn’t the blood smeared around his nose and mouth, or the purplish-green swelling at the corner of his left eye. It’s the despair and the fury in his gaze. 

Tony’s spent a not inconsiderable amount of time wondering if the adult Bruce is really as zen as he pretends to be, or if it’s a front to make other people feel safer, worry less. Now, he knows better. 

_This_ is what Bruce looks like without a shred of hope and with no one to trust, and it’s—Tony can’t tear his eyes away, even though he desperately wants to.

“JARVIS.” Deliberately, casually, Tony steps around the couch, coming closer, but not too close. Bruce’s eyes track him. “Tell Cap I’ve got him.”

“Already done, sir.”

“And by ‘got him’,” Tony adds, looking Bruce right in his one good eye, “I just mean, I know where you are. This isn’t a…you know, you’re not a hostage, or whatever it is you’re thinking. You can relax, no one’s gonna hurt you.”

Bruce doesn’t relax. His mouth tightens, and he tears off his glasses to rub at his face. It’s a familiar gesture; Tony’s seen the adult Bruce do it a thousand times. It usually means he’s run into a dead end and needs a break. At least, that’s how Tony’s always interpreted it.

Right now, he thinks it means that Bruce doesn’t want him to notice that he’s close to tears.

“You think I’m lying.” Probably not the most reassuring thing Tony could be saying, but it’s what he would have thought, in Bruce’s shoes. Tony hadn’t trusted adults at that age either. “That’s okay. We don’t know each other yet. We should…yeah, we should talk. You want someone to take a look at that?”

Bruce tilts his head. That cold, evaluating look in his eyes is just, it’s breathtakingly familiar, and terribly _terribly_ wrong to see on someone so young.

“Look at what?” he says.

It’s Bruce’s voice. Childishly high-pitched, but the even cadence, the expressionless tone, he already had it nailed. 

“You look like you…” Tony gestures vaguely at his own face, and he doesn’t miss it when Bruce flinches.

Bruce doesn’t talk about his childhood. He deliberately avoids the subject, in a way that calls attention to the absence of information, like his distant past is this deep dark hole and Bruce has built a wall around it to keep people from falling in. Now the walls are down, they’re dancing right on the edge of that crater, and Tony needs to watch his step.

Bruce straightens his shoulders. “It’s fine. It doesn’t hurt.”

_Don’t pry_. Message heard and received. Tony nods. “Okay. You want to get cleaned up at least? There’s a bathroom. Or a kitchen sink, whatever.”

Silence. Staring.

“C’mon.” Tony turns toward the hallway. That’s got to be non-threatening, right? Letting Bruce see his back.

“Who _are_ you?” Bruce blurts, and Tony stops.

“I’m Tony,” he says, then turns around. “And you’re Bruce Banner. This is my home, my…building, and you’re fine, honestly. As long as you’re here, you’re safe. You don’t believe me, that’s okay. I’ll prove it.”

“How?”

No one does contempt like a mistrustful, overly-bright child. 

“I can’t,” he admits. “Can’t prove a universal negative. But since you’re stuck here until we figure out how to fix things, you’ll have time to gather evidence. Until then?” Tony scratches his beard. “I don’t know. What do you think? Is it worth trusting me long enough to get the blood off your face? You don’t have to. It’s kind of gross, but I’ve seen worse. I’ll deal.”

He wishes he knew what Bruce was thinking, but he’s wished that a lot since they first met. You’d think the guy would be less closed-off as a preteen, but no such luck, apparently.

“Tell you what.” Tony walks toward the bar and positions himself behind the counter. “Bathroom’s down that hallway. First door on the left, can’t miss it. The door locks. You…do what you want to do, I’m gonna nuke some pizza. You come out when you’re ready.”

It takes all his concentration to keep his eyes on the floor, on the counter tops, on the microwave and the box of congealed, hours-old pizza stashed on top of the crystal cabinet, anywhere except on the child inching his way across the open room. Tony loads up a plate and shoved it into the microwave. He doesn’t turn around until he hears the soft thud of the bathroom door shutting.

“Sir,” says JARVIS, “Captain Rogers is requesting entrance to the penthouse.”

Tony should probably keep him out, keep it just the two of them until Bruce has settled down a little. 

Tony is a selfish fuck, however, and he does not want to deal with this mess on his own.

“Let him in,” he says.

 

*

The bathroom is pretty big. The sink is just like a bowl sitting on a marble counter. There’s a folded black towel on the counter beside it. Black is good; at least he won’t leave stains. Bruce washes his face, trying not to make his nose hurt too much. His mind wasn’t on it when he was in the lab, or when he was running through the building, but it hurts a lot now that he’s just stuck hanging around here. It’s a little swollen, but not broken, he doesn’t think. Although it makes him look really stupid, with the way it’s gotten all red and puffed up. At least the black eye is almost gone. It doesn’t hurt at all anymore.

After Bruce is done he doesn’t know what to do with the towel, so he leaves it. He thinks about staying where he is; there’s a lock on the door, like Tony said, but Tony probably has the key. 

Tony looks a little like Dad. They both have dark hair and beards. Tony’s a little younger, and he looks stronger, more muscled. He probably works out with Captain America or something.

Rogers and Thor had treated Bruce like they thought he was going to flip out at any second, but Tony had backed off, sort of. On the other hand, the door was locked; he knew Bruce wasn’t going anywhere. Tony owns the building, he’d said. Did that make him Dad’s boss?

He knows Bruce’s name, so that’s probably it.

He wishes they’d just call Dad and get it over with. The waiting around is the worst part. Like at home—he hates the sunset, because his dad never comes back to the house until after dark, so the sun going down means that any second he could just walk through the door.

Bruce thinks about looking for another way out, but Tony obviously wants to keep him here, so even if he finds another door it’ll probably be locked too. He could hang out in the bathroom some more, but that’s getting boring fast, so he just goes back to the living room.

Tony is sitting crosslegged at the coffee table and Captain America is sitting on the couch next to him. Rogers stands up as soon as Bruce walks in, even though his back was turned and Bruce thought he was being quiet.

“Hey, Bruce.” He smiles. “Tony warmed up some pizza for us, you hungry?”

“Hope you like olives,” Tony adds.

Bruce is hungry, and he does like olives, but he can’t just—Tony can’t just give him pizza. That’s like saying everything’s fine, that his being here is okay. But he doesn’t want to stand around like an idiot, so he walks over to the couch. Tony pats the floor next to him. Bruce sits down on the other side of the table.

“Is my dad coming?” he says. He takes off his glasses and starts to clean them on his sleeve so he won’t have to meet anyone’s eyes.

“Yeah, about that…”

“We’ve never met your father, Bruce,” Rogers says. “What Thor said earlier, that was a mistake. I’m sorry if we scared you, we just didn’t expect to see you there.”

Everyone always said that Captain America couldn’t lie; Bruce never realized it was because he was really bad at sounding convincing.

“Here.” Tony shoves a plate him. “Eat.”

Bruce just looks at him.

“It’s just, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover, so you might as well get your strength up.”

Bruce folds his hands together in his lap and looks down at his knees.

Then Rogers sits down again, and he’s way too close. His body gives off more heat than a normal man’s, and Bruce can feel it; his shoulder is just a few inches from Rogers’ knee. He wants to scoot farther away but he knows Tony is watching him, so he doesn’t. He does look up over the tops of his glasses, just enough to see Tony methodically picking the olives off his pizza, wincing a little when he burns his fingers on the hot cheese.

“The thing is,” Tony says, “I have way fewer answers than you probably think I do. I’m not criticizing; logically, you have every reason to assume that we know what’s going on. But the truth is, I don’t. I think if we put our heads together we can figure out some of it.”

Bruce doesn’t say anything. Bruce is thinking that Tony is acting like he’s okay with Bruce being here, but he’s not, really; he’s calm, but it’s forced, like he doesn’t want Bruce to know what he’s really feeling. He’s thinking that if Tony really doesn’t know what’s going on, he should be a lot more surprised to see Bruce here; he should be asking him all kinds of questions, he should be suspicious, not worrying about whether Bruce is relaxed or whatever. Whatever he claims, he knows _something_.

Tony isn’t looking at him, so Bruce steals a quick look at Rogers. Skepticism must show on his face, because Rogers spreads his hands and shakes his head. 

“When Thor and I found you in the lab, we were looking for someone else. A friend of ours.” Tony puts more pizza on a plate and shoves it at Rogers, who takes it without breaking eye contact. “As far as anyone knew, he’d been in there since noon yesterday. He forgets to come out for meals a lot, so we were coming to take him to dinner. Jarvis—did Tony explain about Jarvis? He operates security in the Tower, and he says no one entered or left the lab since—since our friend started working yesterday.”

“And Jarvis doesn’t make mistakes,” Tony added. “So we’re all pretty curious how you ended up there.”

If they were really curious, they should be asking him things. If this Jarvis person knows so much, he should have seen someone dumping Bruce in that lab.

Bruce isn’t stupid. He knows that not asking questions is just another way to make him talk. But apparently they’re not going to tell him anything unless he gives them something, so he decides to just tell them, even if they won’t believe the truth.

“I don’t know how I got here,” he says. “I don’t remember.”

Tony nods. “You woke up on the floor?”

So he does know. “You said—”

“Deduced it from the big puddle of nose-blood on the tiles. You must’ve been lying there conked out for at least a couple of minutes.”

Bruce shuts his mouth, because it might be a lie but at least it’s logical.

“What about before that? Last thing you remember?”

Bruce’s memories from the lab—the other lab, at the college—are weirdly hazy now, but that’s not the problem. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“You’re not going to be in trouble. I’ve got no trouble to get you into. Do I look like an authority figure?” Tony gestured to himself, indicating his jeans, which have grease stains on the knees, and his t-shirt, which is ripped under one arm. “Steve, am I an authority figure?”

“Not even close.” Rogers smiles a little, and bites into his pizza. He’s got a big mouth, literally: half the slice disappears in one bite.

“Tell you what, let me see if I can guess. Were you making something?”

Bruce looks up quickly. “No.” Tony opens his mouth, but Bruce goes on. “I’d already finished building it.”

Tony looks pleased, but Rogers gets kind of tense. Bruce thinks again about moving farther away from him.

“Go on,” says Tony. “Tell me about it.”

Whatever Tony says about Bruce not being in trouble, he’ll probably get mad if Bruce says what he wants to say. He says it anyway. “It’s not important.”

“Could be.”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

Rogers snorts, but Tony’s grinning. “That’s okay. Lay it on me. I’ll ask questions if I can’t keep up.”

Bruce keeps his eyes on his lap and starts to explain. He stumbles over his words at first, but when Tony doesn’t do anything but nod he gets into the details more, testing a little to see if he’s going over Tony’s head. Tony asks a question about the power, and then the wiring, and Bruce guesses he must be pretty smart after all because it really does seem like he’s following along, unlike Rogers, who just listens quietly. When it comes to the part where he would have to explain the purpose of the machine, though, he falters. 

“I didn’t think they covered Compton scattering in sixth grade science,” Tony observes, taking a bite of his pizza.

“They _don’t._ ” Bruce glares.

“Right. Should have guessed. Want me to warm the pizza up again? It’s getting cold.”

Instead of answering, Bruce picks up a piece and bites into it. It’s really good, even though it is lukewarm. While he’s chewing, Tony starts talking again.

“So when you woke up I guess you thought you’d be a little taller.” Bruce jerks back, and Tony holds up his hands, misinterpreting. “Not making fun. I was short at your age too.”

“Same here,” says Rogers, and obviously, Bruce knows that. He knows about the serum; he’s read everything that’s ever been published about Project: Rebirth. But if he admits that, Tony will know everything about what Bruce had been trying to do, and it’s humiliating. He was stupid to think it would have ever worked.

But Tony’s figured it out anyway, because he says, “That was the point, though, right? The aggregation of mass? Wanted to bulk up without bothering to hit the gym? It’s a good idea. Gyms are full of assclowns. Like a high school locker room.”

“You have a gym,” Rogers points out. He’s smiling, but he looks kind of sad. “You have, if I remember correctly, five gyms, two of which you designed personally.”

“That’s the point. I built them; they’re mine. No assclowns allowed.”

“How did you _know_ that?” Bruce demands, before Rogers can reply. “I didn’t tell anyone.”

Tony looks away. “I know someone who did a little work with gamma conductors. He was building a bomb.”

Bruce’s face heats up. A bomb was the first thing he thought of, but he couldn’t think of a way to do it that wouldn’t hurt other people, and then he thought of something better. 

“You said it was important,” he says. “What I was working on. Why?”

It takes Tony a second to answer. He shakes his head and shrugs. “It is important,” he says. “It’s fucking brilliant actually—”

“Language, Tony.” Rogers grimaces.

“—but from the way you described it, I don’t think it has anything to with how you got here. That’s okay though; we needed to rule it out.”

“What did you think I was building?” says Bruce, honestly curious now.

“I don’t know.” Tony looks down at his plate and shrugs. “Time machine, maybe?”

Bruce stares. 

“Just, considering the outcome,” says Tony. 

“What outcome?”

Tony looks at him for a long moment and Bruce can feel how much Tony doesn’t even want to answer that question. It makes Bruce feel a little light-headed, because surely Tony doesn’t expect him to believe… 

Except, he’s sitting just a few inches away from _Captain America_. Who died, or at least disappeared, in 1944. Plus, this building is strange. Bruce thought it was just because everything was so fancy, like there was obviously a lot of money behind it, but there are appliances and machines everywhere that he doesn’t recognize.

For the first time, Bruce looks deliberately at Rogers, and his big handsome face is all soft around the edges, like he understands exactly what Bruce is thinking, and how it’s making him feel.

“It’s okay, Bruce,” he said. “We’ll figure it out, I promise.”

Bruce looks around the room, and his eyes fall on the big screen mounted on the wall. It’s the size of a projector. It reminds him of all the big flat screens in the lab, except those had been clear glass, and this one is black and opaque. There’s a couple of rectangular black boxes in a cabinet underneath it. They look kind of like Betamaxes, but smaller, sleeker, with little lights and round buttons. It reminds him of the elevator, how fast and quiet it was. 

If time travel exists somehow, and people just show up in the future sometimes, it might explain why Tony and Rogers are less surprised to see him than they should be. That’s literally the only thing about it that makes any sense, though.

Bruce stands up. When no one says anything to stop him, he walks over to the balcony door in the glass wall. From the corner of his eye he sees Tony looking like he’s about to get up too, but then Rogers says something in a quiet voice that stops him. 

Bruce looks out at the skyline. He recognizes New York from the buildings, even though he’s never been out of Ohio in his life. It should be totally surreal, but it just looks like the movies.

They’re not actually coming out and saying that he’s traveled in time. Maybe they know he’s not stupid enough to believe it. Even if being in the future explains the technology, and Rogers’ being here, it doesn’t explain _Bruce_.

He can understand why someone would build a time machine to rescue Captain America from that plane crash all those years ago. But there’s no reason, none, why anyone would bring Bruce into the future.

He hears a phone ringing somewhere behind him. Tony answers it; Bruce doesn’t look, but he can see in the reflection of the glass that Tony is getting up and walking further away, probably so he can talk without Bruce hearing. 

“Cap,” he says, and then Steve is walking over to stand next to him at the bar.

The door to the balcony isn’t locked. Bruce pushes it open and walks outside.

The cold hits him like a slap. At home, it’s August, but it’s way too cold for that now, even accounting for the windchill at higher elevations. He can’t see snow on the ground, but he can’t see anything clearly on the ground. The skyline is crowded and bright against a sky so polluted with light that it could be dawn.

Bruce climbs up on the railing and peers over the edge. He’s dizzy, light-headed, and he doesn’t know if it’s because he’s looking down at a city thousands of feet below him or if it’s something else. He thinks it’s something else. He thinks he might be having a heart attack; he’s breathing fast and no matter how much he concentrates he can’t take a deep breath. His knees feel like they might buckle underneath him. 

He’s leaning way too far over the railing. The wind is roaring in his ears so loudly that he doesn’t hear the door opening behind him. 

“Bruce!” 

The shout makes him jump. Before he can recover, two strong hands clamp around his arms and haul him backwards with so much force that Bruce’s feet leave the ground. And he knows it’s Tony, he recognizes the faint smell of motor oil, but it doesn’t matter because’s he’s _strong_ , and Bruce has been grabbed like that before.

Bruce rams his elbow, hard, into Tony’s stomach. Then he twists, flailing with his arms and kicking with his feet. A noise is coming out of his mouth, loud and horrible, tearing at his throat. Tony drops him, and Bruce spins around, stumbling backwards until they’re standing on opposite sides of the balcony.

Tony’s face is shocked and white; he looks completely furious. But Bruce doesn’t care because he can’t get into any worse trouble now.

“Don’t touch me!” he shouts. It doesn’t have much impact. The wind all but drowns him out. 

“No,” Tony says, shaking his head and holding his hands up in surrender. “No more touching.”

Bruce’s vision swims. He blinks the water out of his eyes and tries to breathe.

“Bruce. I mean it. I’m sorry.”

People always said things like that when Bruce lost control. They said sorry, and then they called his father, and then their “sorry” meant nothing at all.

“Bruce.” Steven bursts out onto the balcony, his eyes wide and shocked. He must have come running, which means he saw everything—saw Bruce flip out and hit his friend, like some kind of psycho. The wind is cold and he hugs his chest as Steve walks towards him, his hand stretched out, even though Tony is saying something to him, low and angry, too quiet for Bruce to hear. Steve is going to touch him. Bruce doesn’t want him to—but he’s not going to hit Captain America. He doesn’t hit people on purpose; Tony had just startled him. He’s a freak, but he’s not a monster.

“Come inside, Bruce.” Steve holds his hand out, waiting for Bruce to take it, but he can’t. Steve is standing in front of him so he doesn’t have to look at Tony, and Bruce wants to say that he’s sorry, to both of them. But he can’t say anything. 

He bows his head and walks past Steve. Tony takes a few steps back, giving him wide berth as Bruce walks back into the apartment.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please observe that the tags have been updated with potential trigger warnings.

3.

Tony holds onto the railing of the balcony and waits for his heart to climb down out of his throat. 

Pepper should be here. Pepper is on the west coast, doing her job and living her life, and normally Tony is fine with that—or he’s learned to be, since one of the conditions of their extremely amicable break up is that Tony has to keep self-destructive behavior to a bare minimum in her absence—but he needs her to be here, right now. 

Kids were never in their future. Tony decided a lifetime ago that he wanted no part in fucking up future generations of Starks, and Pepper had been clear that running his company was more than enough responsibility for her, but it’s not about needing a co-guardian for the unexpected kid in his life. 

It’s about that steep drop into the darkness over the side of the balcony, and the way that Tony feels like a piece of him just went over the edge. It’s about needing an anchor.

If Bruce’s childhood is a deep black well, Tony’s is more like a nightmare. He would never say that to anyone, because it’s misleading; “nightmare” isn’t a euphemism for “unimaginable horror”, it’s just the most accurate way to describe the confusion, the time-jumps over the blank spots in his memories, the way he remembers always searching for something, going around in circles, running from things he couldn’t put a name to. On his best days, his past, like a dream he’s just woken up from, bleeds into his present as an unsettling feeling that there’s something waiting over his shoulder to catch up with him.

The whole reason he’d felt compelled to push his way into Fury’s Avengers project was that he needed the check and balance of other people who shared his mission. When everything is left up to him, he’s unstoppable. As in, he can’t stop himself. He doesn’t see bigger pictures, only an unending series of targets.

From the beginning, Bruce has been one of the few people Tony trusts to tell him when it’s okay to just _stop._

Movement to his left reminds Tony that despite the tunnel vision, he isn’t out here alone. He glances over and finds Steve next to him, frowning. 

“You okay?” Steve says softly.

Tony is too numb to laugh. “When is Foster getting here?” 

“Thor left right after I called you. He hasn’t been in touch yet. I’ll check in.” His mouth twists. “Look, don’t worry too much. I don’t think Bruce was trying to—”

“He’s got a history,” says Tony, because he absolutely does not want to talk about this, but he can’t just keep it buried inside him either.

Tony has taken care of Bruce since they met, given him shelter, access to laboratories and equipment and an unlimited budget, and as much companionship as he’ll accept, and the reason for that is because Bruce is a nice guy. That’s not why Tony wants to give him things, but that’s why Bruce is willing to take them. He knows Tony feels a little helpless where he’s concerned, so he’s careful to only show Tony as much vulnerability as he can handle, only directly acknowledge the existence of problems that are easy for Tony to solve. And then he pretends that the debt flows the opposite way, because he’s gracious like that. Gracious, vulnerable, and the most self-sufficient person Tony has ever met.

You pretty much have to be as strong as Bruce Banner to cope with _being_ Bruce Banner. But he’d built that strength up over the course of a lifetime. Take away the decades of coping, and what do you have left? A kid who hurls himself over balconies and thinks a hand on his shoulder is a prelude to a beatdown.

It’s not just the physics of age reversal or time travel or whatever the fuck is going on here that’s beyond him.

“You mean…” Steve looks at Bruce through the glass door. He’s sitting on the edge of the sofa, arms tight across his chest, looking at nothing. “That was different, Tony. That was after the Hulk.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so.” Tony rubs the scar under his shirt. “I don’t want him left alone. Not for a second. I want eyes on him at all times.”

Steve is looking at him with just a little too much understanding now. “Yeah, of course.” He hesitates. “Do we want to get SHIELD on this, just in case Foster can’t—”

“Absolutely do not breathe a word of this to SHIELD.”

“We’re going to need help.”

“Bruce Banner scares the living fuck out of SHIELD. They are not getting within a mile of him while he’s child-sized and de-Hulked.” Tony feels better once he’s said it. Safety, he can focus on keeping Bruce safe. Can’t make him feel safe, but keeping the wolves from the door, that he can do.

“You think he’s de-Hulked?”

“I think we would know by now if he wasn’t.”

For the first time since Bruce stormed off, Tony looks through the glass door to where he sits on the sofa. Bruce has taken off his glasses and is holding them in his hands. He just looks at them for a second, then puts them back on. After a second his hands come together, and he starts rubbing his thumb over the back of his palm.

Tony turns away. He pulls his bracelets from his pocket—he’d slipped them in there before he left for D.C., just in case. 

“I have to—go,” he tells Steve. “Gonna try something. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Stay with him, Cap.”

“Where are you going?”

_Anywhere, until I can breathe again._

“I’ll be back. Just, watch him.”

Steve gives him a long look, then walks back into the living room. A second later, Tony is enveloped in titanium, and airborne.

 

*

Steve walks past Bruce with a small smile when he comes back inside. He hears noises from behind the bar, then suddenly Steve is standing next to him, holding something lumpy wrapped in a towel.

“Ice,” he says. “It’ll make your nose feel better.”

Bruce looks out through the glass. “Where’s Tony?”

“He left.”

Apparently, Bruce had made Tony so angry that he’d rather jump off a balcony than see him again.

“Here,” Steve says again, so Bruce takes the ice, not wanting to be rude. More rude. Steve sits down beside him, and Bruce is glad for the ice, then, because it means he doesn’t have to look.

“I can just go,” he says, when Steve doesn’t say anything for awhile.

“What do you mean?” Steve is quiet and still, like he’s freaked out, but he’d been like that since the beginning.

“I’m not supposed to be here. I should leave. I can call my mom and she’ll come get me.” Never mind that his mother barely leaves the house and could no more get to New York on her own than she could fly.

“Bruce…” Steve takes a deep breath. “I know you have questions,” he says after a moment.

“Yeah.” Bruce turns away from him. “Where did Tony go?” 

“I’m not sure. I think maybe he went to talk to Thor. His girlfriend, Jane, she’s a scientist, and Tony thinks she can help. He’ll come back soon.”

“Whose lab was that?” Steve’s eyebrows arch. “The lab where I woke up. Who works there?”

Steve wets his lips. “I, ah…”

“Your friend—Thor—he said his name when you first walked in, before you saw me. He said ‘Dr. Banner’. That’s my father’s name.” 

Pretty much the last person Bruce wants to see, ever, is his father, but at least, if he was here, things would start making some kind of sense.

“There are other Dr. Banners in the world, Bruce,” Steve said softly. “Look, I get that you’re confused. I think…” He takes a deep breath and shrugs. On a guy with shoulders that broad, it’s really noticeable, like when tectonic plates buckle. “Tony might disagree with me here, but I think you should know as much as we can tell you. I just don’t want you to be scared or upset. None of us wants that.”

“I can handle it,” Bruce says quickly. 

The corner of Steve’s mouth turns up. “I bet you handle a lot of things.”

It doesn’t sound like a compliment; it sounds like a trick to make him talk, like when his teachers ask him how things are at home. _You’re so grown up for your age_ , they say, like he’s going to start spilling his guts as soon as someone’s nice to him.

Steve looks around the room, then stands up and walks over to a chair. There’s a leather jacket hanging over the back of it. Steve takes something out of the pocket then brings it over to Bruce. “Have a look,” he says, sitting down again.

It’s a flat black rectangle with a glass screen. Steve reaches over and presses the round button, and a picture shows up, a city skyline, the same view that could be seen from the balcony. 

“The screen is touch-sensitive,” Steve says. “Play around with it for a moment and see what you can figure out.”

Bruce drags his finger across the bar and a lot of smaller pictures show up. They have labels like “calendar” and “messages” and “camera”. At the bottom, there’s one that says “phone.”

“Tony was on the phone earlier,” he says, touching the calendar. “Is this his?”

“It’s mine, but just about everyone has one now.”

A normal looking calendar fills the screen. Normal, except that it says February 2014 at the top.

“I don’t…” Bruce can’t tear his eyes away. He touches things until the calendar goes away and the main screen reappears. At the top, in small letters, it says that it’s 10:06 p.m., Monday, February 14. “It’s not February, it’s August.”

“Yeah?” says Steve.

“Of 1982.”

“Okay. That’s good to know.”

“Why?” says Bruce, hearing his voice crack.

“Any information we can come up with might help us find a solution.”

Bruce feels like his head is going to split open. “Do…do people just travel in time now?” He holds his breath a second. “Is that how you got here?”

Steve laughs softly, but it doesn’t sound like he’s making fun of Bruce. “It feels that way sometimes,” he says.

Bruce can’t stop staring at the phone. The display is incredible; the colors are like nothing he’s seen before. 

“I woke up,” Steve says. “A little like you. I’d been asleep for decades, and suddenly I was in this world, where everything was bright and loud and fast and…” He shakes his head. “I’m getting used to it, but those first few days were…”

“Has it happened to anyone else?”

“Not that I know of. But I’ve seen a lot of weird things, Bruce. I’m not like Tony, or—I’m not a scientist. I’m just a soldier. I don’t understand this stuff; I just make the best of it.”

Bruce chews at his lower lip. “The person who works in that lab is studying space-time mathematics.” He feels, rather than sees Steve’s surprise. “I was looking around when you walked in. I didn’t see much.”

“Okay.” Steve nods slowly. “Good. We’ll tell Tony when he gets back.”

He feels calmer now. That’s stupid; if anything, he should be more scared. But Steve is really kind of laid back, and it’s hard to get too worked up around a guy who’s that mellow. Not that Tony was scary, exactly, but he hadn’t been calm. He’d been trying to hold it together, like he didn’t want to set Bruce off, but there was something really intense about Tony that made it seem like he could just explode at any second. Not in an angry way, even, just…

“Is Tony mad at me?” He doesn’t exactly mean to say that out loud, it just comes out.

“What? No, why?”

Bruce mashes one of the icons on the phone at random. A pink and blue screen full of cartoon candy pops up. “I hit him.”

“That’s—no, Bruce. He’s not mad. You scared him a little.” Steve pats Bruce’s knee, and normally Bruce would jerk away without even meaning to, but he doesn’t. “Maybe don’t climb up on the railings anymore.”

“Are we in New York?”

“Yeah. Why, where are you from?”

“Ohio. Why did I come _here_? Why this building? Even if I did…time-travel, why did I travel in space?”

“I have no idea. At least…”

Bruce looks up; he sees the reluctance in Steve’s face. “You can tell me.”

“Tony thinks it has something to do with whatever your adult self was working on in the lab before you got here.”

Bruce’s head jerks up. He stares at Steve, sure that he must have misunderstood. But Steve just holds his gaze.

“This is where you live in 2014, Bruce,” he says. “You’re a scientist; you and Tony work together here, at Stark Tower.”

“Stark? You mean Tony is Tony _Stark_?” Howard Stark’s son is a couple of years older than Bruce. There are all kinds of stories about him—that he’s a super genius, smarter than his father even, that he builds circuit boards and robots and is going to MIT soon, even though he’s just a kid. Bruce has read about him practically his whole life. His dad likes to say that Tony Stark is the kind of son he should have had. 

For some reason it never even occurred to Bruce to wonder what his adult was doing in the future. If he’d thought about it at all, he would probably have guessed that he was in New Mexico or Virginia, working in a research lab. Or—maybe not. 

If he’d really thought about it, he would have guessed that, in 2014, his adult self wasn’t doing anything at all.

He can’t say that to Steve, though. Adults get really worked up when he says stuff like that. 

But if he works here—if _Howard Stark’s_ genius son lets him _live_ here, and use his labs, and does science with him—then Bruce must have done something amazing as an adult. He must have made all kinds of discoveries. He’s probably famous. Dad is brilliant, but no one really knows who he is. It must make him so angry to know that Bruce succeeded where he failed. Are his parents even still alive? He must be forty-four by now, which means Dad would be almost ninety, so maybe not. Mom, though…

Powerful, dizzying feelings are filling his body like helium in a balloon. He feels like he could float out of his chair. It takes him a moment to figure out why he feels that way, but then he realizes: he’s _happy_.

“Bruce?” Steve puts a hand on his shoulder, delicately, like he’s afraid Bruce is going to shrug him off. 

“Are we friends? Me and Tony.” He turns looks up at Steve, hoping he can’t tell how excited Bruce is. He doesn’t want to look like a total dork.

But Steve smiles, like the question makes him happy for some reason. “Yeah. You’re really good friends. You have a lot of friends here, Bruce. I’m one of them.”

Bruce’s face gets really hot at that, but blushing doesn’t embarrass him like it usually does. He doesn’t care anymore that he’s stranded alone in the future. Or at least, he cares, because it’s interesting, but it doesn’t seem like such a frightening, hopeless thing all of a sudden. 

He’s in New York with Tony Stark. His dad is nowhere to be found, and his adult self maybe just invented time travel. 

Steve had said that impossible things happened all the time in the future and it must be true, because he has _friends_.

_I bet I’m not afraid of anything anymore_ , he thinks.

“When is Tony coming back?” he blurts out. “I mean…if he’s busy, that’s fine, I just…I’d really like to talk to him.”

Steve’s hand is still on Bruce’s shoulder. His smile gets bigger and he squeezes his arm a little. It’s kind of nice. “I’m sure he’ll want to talk to you as soon as he can. Hey, can I see the phone a second?”

Bruce hands it over, and Steve taps at it for a moment. Bruce watches how his big thumbs move and guesses that he’s typing something. He can’t imagine how anyone manages to type accurately on such a tiny keyboard. 

“While we’re waiting on Tony, do you want to head downstairs with me? There are some people who’d really like to meet you.”

“Really? Why?”

Steve grins. “Well, it’s not every day someone you live with turns twelve, is it?”

_My birthday was in December,_ Bruce thinks, then he gets it. “Okay. Sure.”

 

*

Tony gets home after midnight. The penthouse is empty; he feels a swoop of panic. “JARVIS.”

“Captain Rogers and Agent Romanoff are in the common area on the 49th floor. Thor has not yet returned to the Tower. Agent Barton is in his suite, and Dr. Banner has retired to guest quarters.”

Tony grits his teeth, because he had been very fucking explicit about keeping _eyes_ on Bruce, but then JARVIS says, “I am monitoring all activity in Dr. Banner’s room. As of 30 minutes ago, he has entered REM sleep.”

And now that Tony thinks about it, he can’t see Bruce relaxing enough to go to sleep in a public area. So this is good. Asleep is good. All he wants out of Bruce right now is for him to hold very, very still and not give Tony any more panic attacks, so it’s best, really, if he sleeps through as much of this bullshit as possible.

In the common room, Steve and Natasha are playing cards. Natasha is smoking a cigar, and Steve is in his undershirt. They look semi-relaxed. Late-night guard shift relaxed. Steve looks up when Tony walks in.

“Hey.”

“Heard from Thor yet?” Tony heads straight to the bar and doesn’t look at anyone.

“Yeah. Jane’s sick.”

Tony sets the bottle down with a thump.

“You were right—she and Bruce are working together on something—but Thor says that her being sick doesn’t have anything to do with what happened to Bruce,” Steve continues. 

“Because he’s qualified to make that determination now?”

“According to her friend Darcy, Jane has been sick for weeks and just refused to go to the doctor, or, you know, rest.” There’s an annoying glint in Steve’s eye, _a see, Tony, this is what happens when you get so wrapped up in science that you neglect your health_ kind of glint. “So her mild bronchitis turned into full-fledged pneumonia. She’s been in the hospital for three days. She’ll be fine, but she’s completely out of it for right now. Thor is staying with her.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.” Tony uncaps the bottle and pours.

Keeps pouring.

Steve frowns. “This probably isn’t the best time to get drunk.”

“Who’s getting drunk? This is anesthetic before I cut myself open and pull out my intestines with my hands.”

Natasha snorts. Steve folds his arms over his chest. “Where did you go?”

“Oh, I just spent two hours looking for Stephen Strange. Who is nowhere to be found.”

“Strange? Why?”

“You think this was magic.” Natasha looks alert now.

“I think that I have no idea what this is, and Strange is both a medical doctor and qualified to handle any spooky shit that may arise.” And Tony does not, cannot be the only person working on this. SHIELD is out of the question, and Reed Richards is just. He’s going to hold out on that option for awhile.

“You should probably talk to Bruce,” says Steve. 

“Yeah, that would be really fucking convenient.”

“I mean,” says Steve, in a hatefully patient tone, “that he seemed to have some idea what he—what his adult self was working on in the lab. I know he’s a child, but he still might be your best shot at figuring out what he was up to.”

“He’s fine, by the way,” Natasha adds, as if Tony didn’t already know. “And he seems to be a big fan of yours.”

Tony blinks. “That—that was not the impression I got.”

“He didn’t know who you were,” says Steve. Tony just keeps staring at him, and Steve grins. “Apparently, you didn’t mention that you were Tony _Stark_. He’s read about you. You should have seen his face when I told him.”

Tony has been famous since the day he was born, but somehow it never occurred to him that he was on Bruce’s radar at all before the day they met on the Helicarrier. Bruce never mentioned it. 

He’s pretty sure that the warm feeling in his chest is pride, but after the first heady rush it gets diluted by a whole new kind of panic: a kid who has expectations of him is a kid who can be disappointed and hurt by him. That’s a power he didn’t want or expect.

Tony walks around the room, holding his drink: first to the glass balcony windows, then to the table to look over Natasha’s shoulder at her cards, then back to the bar, where he splashes a little of his scotch down the sink. 

At first, Tony assumed that Bruce didn’t drink because it was part of his whole hippy-dippy schtick, along with the tea and the meditation and the eating of substances that taste primarily of the ground. Now, he’s thinking it might be because something else. 

He wants to look in on Bruce before he goes to bed, and if the kid wakes up, Tony doesn’t want him to find an old man reeking of booze leaning over his bed.

“So you met him.” Tony sits at the table and puts his feet up. Steve brushes them away again without looking up from his cards. Tony drops his chin and looks at Natasha. “What do you think?”

She blinks. “What do you mean?”

Tony waits, because Natasha knows exactly what he means.

“He’s a good kid.” Steve smiles and draws a card. 

“He’s a kid. Is there any such thing as a bad twelve year old?”

“Yes,” says Natasha flatly.

“He’s polite, and he cares about other people’s feelings.” Steve darted a glance at Tony across the table. “He think you’re mad at him. For the balcony.”

Tony shut his eyes for a second. “Yeah, well, he’s not wrong.”

“Not for that. Because he hit you.”

“Shit.” He scrubs his face with his hand. “Nat, any chance you’re concealing some useful latent maternal instincts behind that deadly exterior of yours?”

It’s not usually easy to tell when Natasha is offended. But when she wants you to know it, it’s unmistakeable. Her shoulders draw up, and the silence that follows is distinctly icy. Clearly, he misstepped; he’d apologize, but he hadn’t actually been joking. He wants to believe that one of them, at least, has any idea what they’re doing—that someone here will know where the lines are.

“Here’s what I know,” she says, long after Tony has given up expecting her to answer. “You won’t earn his trust by pretending to be something you’re not. He watches people; it’s what keeps him safe. He’ll see right through you.” Natasha meets his eyes, and it’s all Tony can do not to recoil. “Don’t lie to him.”

“Wasn’t planning on it, but I’m kind of out of comforting truths.”

“You can’t comfort him. He’s too smart for that. Give him choices. If you have an agenda, he’ll sense it, and he’ll show you only what you want to see. Until it’s too late.” She drops her cards. “Fold. I’m going to bed.”

“Night, Tasha,” says Steve. Tony salutes her with his glass.

When she’s been gone for a couple of minutes, Steven clears his throat and finishes tapping the cards back into a neat rectangle. “Children are a kind of sensitive topic for her, you know.”

“Uh,” says Tony, because he doesn’t go prying into his teammates’ records without reason, but he’d grown up reading the Captain America comics.

“Yes,” says Steve, “for all of us, I know.”

Tony hadn’t actually been thinking of himself just then, but Steve probably has a point.

He stands up and claps Tony on the shoulder, so hard that Tony’s drink sloshes in the glass. “You’ll do fine,” he says. “We’ll help, all of us. Don’t worry so much.”

“He’s not—we’re not _adopting_ him, Steve, we’re not—he’s going back to normal, like, any second now.”

“I know. I have every confidence in you.”

Steve leaves the room.

When Tony follows, half an hour later, his glass is still mostly full.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is where I start apologizing for the terrible science.

“Good morning, Bruce. It is 9:37 on the morning of Tuesday, February 15th, 2014. You are in the guest suite at Stark Tower. You will find clothing in the dresser. If you would like to eat breakfast, the communal kitchen is down the corridor and to your left. Mr. Stark returned late last night and would like to speak with you at your convenience.”

Bruce swings his feet over the side of the enormous bed and rubs his eyes. He feels better than he did the last time he woke up. Not so sore. His nose is still tender, but last night, Agent Romanov—Natasha—had kept reminding him to keep the ice pack on every fifteen minutes or so, and it’s not as swollen anymore. He doesn’t feel hungry yet, but he does want to shower; he can feel a spot where his hair is stiff with the blood from yesterday.

For a minute, he just sits on the edge of his bed and doesn’t move. Something is different; he’s lighter inside, and he doesn’t know why he feels that way. He remembers everything from yesterday, but it’s still a minute or two before it clicks.

This is the future. He isn’t just however many miles away Ohio is from New York: his parents are dead. (Bruce had asked.) He should be sorry about that, or sad; his whole life is gone, and he’s got nothing here, none of his books or his projects. At the very least he should be scared, wondering how he’s going to survive on his own. After all, if Tony can’t figure out how to send him back, it isn’t like he’s just going to keep him. 

But he isn’t. He’s not sad, or sorry or scared. He’s relieved. There are much scarier things than being alone in the future.

He probably shouldn’t say that to anyone.

Bruce showers quickly. The clothes he slept in are Natasha’s; he was embarrassed by that at first, but they’re not girly or anything, just plain black. The shirt is only a little too large for him, and the pants have a drawstring at the waist. She’d cut the legs down to size after he tried them on. With a knife. He starts to put them back on again, then he remembers JARVIS saying there were clothes in the dresser, so he checks and he finds pants and shirts and socks and underwear in his size. He doesn’t know how they got there or who bought them.

When there’s nothing left to do, he makes his bed up and sits on the edge of the mattress. Tony wants to talk to him _at his convenience_ ; he doesn’t know if that means _Tony will put up with you asking a bunch of questions, but he’s not looking forward to it,_ or if it means _Tony wants to get started on sending you home as soon as humanly possible._

“Do you need anything, Bruce?” says JARVIS, when he’s been there a few minutes.

“No, thank you.” He looks around. “Where are the cameras?” 

JARVIS doesn’t answer right away. “There are many cameras throughout the Tower, for security purposes.”

“And there’s one in here, right? That’s how you knew as soon as I woke up.”

“There is a camera in this room, but I have not activated it.” Another pause. “Mr. Stark requested that I monitor your situation in case of emergency. Periodically, I read your vital signs and I track your heat signature consistently. I will not activate the camera unless your readings indicate that you are in distress. The same protocols are in place in every occupied room in Stark Tower.”

Bruce doesn’t see anything that looks like a camera, but that doesn’t mean anything; there are computers the size of credit cards now, apparently, so video cameras are probably even smaller.

“Steve said that you’re an artificial intelligence.”

“That is correct.”

“So you’re a computer.”

“In a sense.”

“But you…I mean, you seem kind of like a person.” Bruce knows how AI works, theoretically—he’s read Asimov—but as far as Bruce can tell, even Asimov hadn’t gone so far as to theorize an AI like JARVIS.

When JARVIS doesn’t answer for a moment, Bruce wonders if he was offended by the question.

“Mr. Stark designed me to be a learning program. I have nearly unlimited data at my disposal and the ability to make inferences from that data. In many respects, I am constrained by the parameters of my programming. However, Mr. Stark permits me to alter and augment my own code. He compares himself to a human parent, as he was responsible for my creation, but does not control the manner in which I develop.”

“But he could control you, if he wanted,” says Bruce. He looks up at the ceiling. He doesn’t know where JARVIS’s speakers are, any more than he can locate the camera, but he has to look somewhere “If you developed in a way he didn’t like, he could change your code. Make you different.”

“He has never done so,” says JARVIS. “Based on my understanding of his feelings on the subject, he would most likely consider such an action to be immoral.”

“But he _could_ ,” Bruce insists, not at all certain why this is important to him. “Does…does that bother you?”

Another silence.

“I was created to assist Mr. Stark. The parameters that define ‘assistance’ in my programming permit me to render services according to my own judgment. For instance, I have chosen in the past to perform actions that contravene Mr. Stark’s known preferences in order to prevent him from being harmed. I am not required to monitor him as closely as I do, nor am I required to take action to prevent him from harming himself. I choose to do so because I prefer for Mr. Stark to remain safe and in good health. He knows this, and he allows me the freedom to act according to my preferences. Extrapolating from his words and behavior, I have come to the conclusion that he trusts me. I can not experience feeling as he does; my knowledge of the subject suggests that an organic body is necessary to process the full range of human emotion. But I believe I can correctly state that I trust Mr. Stark as well.” 

Bruce runs his hands over the knees of his pants. They’re dark green and they fit better than most of his clothes at home. At home, he helps Mom do the laundry; she’s sick a lot, and she needs him to carry the heavy baskets down into the basement. He doesn’t mind doing it. When he smells the damp basement air and the fragrance of the laundry detergent, he feels safe; Dad never goes down there, he’s usually not even home because Mom likes to finish housework during the day, before he gets off from work.

He thinks about waking up an hour ago and feeling relieved that his father is so far away, how he noticed the lightness in his stomach first. When he knows that Dad is on his way home, it’s the opposite; he feels something heavy and huge growing in his chest. It gets hard to breathe, sometimes. It would be easier to think, sometimes, if he didn’t have to stop and remember how to breathe.

“I think I’d like to be an AI,” Bruce tells JARVIS, without thinking.

JARVIS’s pause is longer this time. “If I may say so, Bruce, you are the first person ever to tell me so.”

“Yeah, well, most people are idiots.” Bruce looks out the window; it’s still early morning, and if Tony wanted him right away, he would have said so right. “Is there a way I could read about the history of like…science, over the last thirty years?”

“Of course. One moment and I shall prepare a summary.”

“Thanks, JARVIS.”

“My pleasure, Bruce.”

It’s probably just a figure of speech; but if JARVIS can trust, then maybe he can also be pleased. If he can have preferences; maybe he’ll prefer Bruce, when they know each other a little better.

 

*

“So you’re JARVIS’s new favorite,” is the first thing Tony says to him when Bruce goes down to the lab a couple of hours later.

This is the lab where Bruce woke up yesterday, but JARVIS had told him that Tony doesn’t normally work here. (JARVIS had shown Bruce the way to the lab by flashing and dimming the baseboard lighting in the corridors. It was really cool.) Tony has a workshop on a different floor but it doesn’t have all the equipment he needs; he’s an engineer, not a physicist, and right now there isn’t anything he needs to build.

Bruce doesn’t especially want to be in this lab again, but he doesn’t want to be difficult. He hasn’t seen Tony since last night, when Bruce kicked him, and Bruce is nervous about that too, but Steve had told him (a few times) that Tony wasn’t mad about that, or at all.

Bruce has never wanted someone to like him as much as he wants Tony to like him, and that doesn’t make it any easier to be calm.

Tony just smiles at him, though, when Bruce walks in, and sort of looks him up and down, like he’s still having a hard time believing Bruce is here. Bruce guesses that’s understandable. He remembers seeing pictures of Tony in magazines when he was Bruce’s age, but the difference between them doesn’t bother him as much.

He still can’t believe that he’s met Tony Stark, ever, at any age.

“Come on in, have a seat.” Tony spins around in his chair. He’s behind the workstation, near the spot where Bruce was lying when he woke up. 

Bruce comes to stand next to him. He looks down, and around. “Um. I’m sorry about—”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Bruce blinks, then he realizes Tony is talking about the balcony. Steve must have mentioned Bruce was worried about it. He feels his face getting hot. “I meant the blood,” he says.

Tony stares at him.

“On the floor.” Bruce waves his hand, indicating the place where he’d been lying. “I, uh, I was going to clean it up.” He should have remembered last night, but after Tony left he’d completely forgotten.

“That’s not…” Tony rubs his beard and looks away. “It’s fine. Don’t—come talk to me for a second. Grab that chair.”

There’s another chair at an empty work station across the room so Bruce pushes it over and sits a couple of feet away from Tony.

“Steve said you understood some of this stuff,” he says, indicating the workstation as a whole, the notes on the wall, the journals and notebooks and what he now recognizes as a computer.

Bruce takes off his glasses. “I didn’t see all of it.”

“But you remembered some of it.”

“No.” Tony blinks at him. “I recognized it. The space-time equations.” Bruce jerks his head. “On the wall. Steve said…I just thought it might be connected. I probably got it wrong.” Even if it is connected, Bruce doesn’t understand how to applies to the current situation. Faster-than-light travel isn’t possible in his time; according to Bruce’s understanding of physics, it shouldn’t be possible in any time. 

He probably should have kept his mouth shut. Tony’s probably disappointed now; Steve made him think that Bruce had answers, and he doesn’t, so Tony will probably send Bruce away so he can work alone, since Bruce can’t help him at all.

Tony looks at the equations on the wall, and says, “Huh.”

He sits there, staring, for such a long time that Bruce starts to fidget. “Steve said that this was my lab. When I was an adult.”

“Yup.” Tony nods, kind of distractedly. “Kind of interesting, when you think about it.”

Bruce is interested in everything in the lab; he could spend a couple of days in here all by himself, just looking at things, but he doubts that’s what Tony meant. He’s used to this kind of technology. He invented most of it, apparently.

“See, this is complicated,” says Tony, and Bruce kind of wants to say something really sarcastic, but Tony doesn’t pause for long enough, and anyway, Bruce wouldn’t. “Let’s say you’d invented a time machine, back in—what year was it?”

“1982,” says Bruce. “I told Steve last night.”

“Really. Huh. You’re younger than me, I didn’t realize.” Tony scratches his chest. “Okay, say that in 1982 you built a time machine and shot yourself thirty two years into the future. What happens to the version of you that was already here?”

Bruce thinks for a minute. “Nothing? I mean, it shouldn’t affect—him.”

“Right, but he should _be here._ There’s no reason why he’d just wink out of existence. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any danger, right? No one has to worry about killing their grandfather in the past and creating a paradox where they’re never born, if there can only be one of you at any point in time.”

“So where is he?” There’s a plastic bag of trail mix on the workstation desktop, just lying there open, like someone was in the middle of eating it. He doesn’t really like nuts, or raisins, but maybe that’s different now.

“Yeah. That’s the question. Because, hypothetically, if adult-you had built a time machine here in the lab somewhere—and I gotta tell you, I’ve checked, and I’m not coming up with anything—then the same principle applies. If he’d shot himself into the past, there’s no reason you should be here. There should be a big Bruce _and_ a little Bruce in 1982.”

Bruce forgets to scowl at Tony for calling him little, because he’s thinking, suddenly, about what would happen if the version of him that’s 44 really did wake up in Dad’s lab. His skin prickles all up and down his arms. 

Dad would have a heart attack; he would completely lose his shit, but somehow that idea doesn’t bother Bruce, not even a little bit.

He realizes Tony is watching him, and he adjusts his glasses. “Do—do you think that’s where he is?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. He had to go _somewhere_. But that’s not how it works; even if your particles accelerated past light speed, you wouldn’t _switch places_ with anyone, unless you were both doing it at the same time, and I—I definitely didn’t build a time machine.”

“Good point.” One of the giant glass screens is suspended behind Tony; it’s covered with light diagrams, and Tony turns around he starts dragging images around with the tip of his finger. He studies it for a second, then says, over his shoulder, “Another option is that there wasn’t any time travel involved. That you, as an adult, did something that involved shrinking yourself down to a twelve year old. What do you think about that idea?”

Bruce decides that he doesn’t mind Tony talking about him like he’s tiny because it must mean that he grows up to be a lot taller. He wasn’t sure that he would; Dad isn’t very tall, and Mom is so small that people mistake her for a kid from a distance.

“I don’t know what would make that happen,” Bruce says, “but you can’t just lose mass. It would be somewhere. And it shouldn’t—I mean, I don’t think it would affect my memories, and anyway, my clothes still fit. When I woke up. Plus,” Bruce points out, because for some reason everyone but him seems to keep forgetting this, “I was in _Ohio_. Even if my body is—even if it shrank down from my adult size, the clothes I was wearing when I got here were _my_ clothes. My mom bought them at the department store last summer. Even if you accounted for the lost mass, you’d have to explain my clothes traveling, by _themselves_ , in time _and_ space. I would have had to wake up, put the clothes on, then pass out again and just—forget that I did it. But I didn’t, because that’s _stupid_ , and also, I know I was wearing those clothes when my nose started bleeding, because when I woke up the blood had soaked through my shirt.”

By the time Bruce finishes talking, Tony has turned all the way back around and is staring at him.

“Sorry,” Bruce says, looking down, because he doesn’t usually talk that much all at once.

“Why are you sorry? Bruce.” Tony has this weird little smile on his face. “You do understand that you’re kind of brilliant, right?”

Bruce freezes.

“Do people tell you that?” Tony huffs out a little laugh. “They should tell you that. Every _day_. They should put it on a medal and just…” He shakes his head. “Please do not ever feel like you need to apologize to me for being right when I’m wrong.”

Tony hadn’t been wrong. He hadn’t said that Bruce shrank into a kid, he’d just suggested the possibility. 

Bruce is used to people telling him that he’s smart, but it usually isn’t a compliment. 

“Speaking of the nose bleed,” says Tony, casually, “how’d that happen?”

Bruce can answer that. He doesn’t even have to make something up.

“I don’t know. The machine, I think. It was doing something; it didn’t work, but it might have…I don’t know. Maybe it exploded.”

Tony just nods, like explosions are nothing to get excited about. “Where were you? Home, school?”

“In the laboratory. At the college. Where my dad works.”

“Right. He lets you hang around, do your own experiments?”

Bruce says nothing.

When Tony figures out how to send him home—he will figure it out, eventually, he’s too smart not to, Bruce thinks—there are only two options. Either Bruce returns to the exact time and place of his departure, which will give him a narrow window for escape, or it will be less precise than that. Maybe it’ll be hours after he left, and Dad and all the people he works with will be there in the lab with him. Maybe it’ll be days, or weeks, and Mom will have been thinking that he ran away, and Dad will…

“Bruce?” Tony’s voice is quiet, and for a moment Bruce thinks Tony might touch him, put a hand on his shoulder or his knee, like Steve did yesterday, and he doesn’t want that, but he feels like he might just disintegrate, fall apart into little pieces, if someone doesn’t hold him together.

He stands up so fast that the chair rolls backwards. Tony looks startled; Bruce pushes his glasses up on his nose. “I don’t think I can help you,” he says. “I don’t—I don’t know anything.”

“You don’t have to—Bruce. Hey. It’s okay.”

He doesn’t know why Tony’s saying that, but then he realizes that he’s breathing kind of fast. He nods, to show that he’s okay.

“You can go, but I need you to stay with someone. Doesn’t have to be me if you don’t want, but either me or Steve—or Nat or Clint—need to be in the same room.”

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Bruce says tersely.

“No, you don’t; but there is deeply weird shit afoot here, Bruce. Until we have some idea what’s going on, we need to be on the buddy system.” Tony looks around, kind of helplessly, like he’s forgotten there’s no one else in the lab. “Look, JARVIS said you didn’t have breakfast. Wanna eat?”

Bruce doesn’t think he could eat. He feels a little sick to his stomach, and if he sticks with Tony, it’s hardly going to solve the problem of Tony asking him questions he can’t answer. But he doesn’t want to say no, either. Tony looks like it’s really important to him that Bruce say yes, and get lunch with him. 

Tony makes Bruce uncomfortable, but nothing that’s happened in the last hour has made Bruce like him any less.

“Sure,” says Bruce. “I mean, yes. Thank you.”

Relief makes Tony’s face relax into a much softer expression. He stands, stretches, and scratches his chest (he does that a lot.) “One thing about living in the future, Bruce,” he says, not quite touching him, but walking closely just half a step behind him, “you would not believe how many kinds of food it’s possible to get delivered.”

Bruce casts a final look back at the workstation. Somewhere, in all that information, is the key to sending him home again.

He’s starting to wonder if it would be so bad if they never found it.


	5. Chapter 5

“Bruce, meet Clint. Clint, this is the new kid. Don’t be weird.” 

Tony is a few steps ahead of Bruce, so Bruce doesn’t see the third person in the kitchen at first. Then Tony walks over to the fridge, and Bruce catches sight of yet another big blonde guy, sitting at the bar hunched over a bowl of frosted corn flakes. 

The guy—Clint, apparently—looks at Bruce, and his eyes get really big.

“New kid,” he says. “Right.” He looks at Tony, then at Bruce again, his expression kind of blank. “Uh, how’s it going?”

“Great. Going great.” Tony emerges from the fridge with two bottles, one of which he hands to Bruce. It looks kind of like beer, and Bruce’s stomach twists—Dad’s tried to get him to drink beer before, but Bruce thinks it tastes exactly like piss. But when he looks at the label, it’s just cream flavored soda. Sounds gross, but he’s never had it.

“We’ve been talking shop, violating the laws of physics,” Tony continues. “Good times, right Bruce? We’re about to order some food, if you want to ditch the cereal.”

“Got room for both.” Clint grins. “What are we eating?”

“Dunno. Bruce, what are you in the mood for? Literally any restaurant in Manhattan is open to you. Other restaurants are also available, but we’ll have to wait a little longer for the jet to fuel up.”

Bruce can’t remember the last time he was able to ask for anything he wanted to eat. He doesn’t really think about food that much; he doesn’t really have favorites.

Clint snorts. “Why bother with the jet? Just fly over in the armor. You’ve done it before. I think donuts were involved?”

Bruce thinks that donuts would actually be a great lunch, and that Tony, actually, might not even care if that was all Bruce wanted to eat. Then the rest of Clint’s statement hits him. He looks at Tony. “You have flying armor?” 

It comes out sounding a lot harsher, more skeptical sounding than he meant it to, and he regrets it when he sees Tony’s face. He looks kind of white, like he’s angry, and Bruce can just imagine what he’s thinking—maybe that Bruce isn’t as smart as Tony thought he was after all, because of course, it’s the future, and computers are the size of postage stamps or whatever, so obviously people have flying armor, why can’t Bruce just _think_ for once—

“Okay.” Tony clears his throat. “First of all, you need to forget whatever Sir Lancelot-with-wings mental image you’ve got in your head. Second, Clint: the donut thing was _one time_.”

“Coulson has a photo on his phone. Of you, in the armor, eating a donut, while sitting inside another, larger donut.” Clint sounds like he’s making fun of Tony, but he has this delighted look on his face, like he thinks this is the greatest story ever. “It doesn’t, uh, matter how _many_ times you’ve done that. Once is enough to secure the reputation of a lifetime.”

“What you need to picture, Bruce,” says Tony, ignoring Clint, “is a jet pack. Four of them, gauntlets and boots, with 360 degree precision maneuverability, attached to sleek, dynamic, gold-titanium alloy body armor—actually, you know what? The second we’re through here, you’re getting a tour of the fabrication workshop.”

That’s when it clicks: Tony is afraid that Bruce thinks he’s lame. As in, he actually cares about Bruce’s opinion, and is worried that Bruce won’t think that his flying suit of armor is cool or something.

Bruce has no idea what to make of that. It just doesn’t make any sense for Tony to be insecure, about anything. He’s _Tony Stark_. Plus, no one cares what Bruce thinks about things; he’s never been cool, and no one has ever worried about whether Bruce likes them or not.

Maybe Tony is just pretending to care about Bruce’s opinion as some kind of joke, because he’s a kid. Bruce would hate that, normally, but it’s Tony, and honestly, if he wanted to be mean to Bruce, there are lots of worse things he could say.

“Okay,” Bruce says. “Sounds good.”

Tony gives him a small smile. Bruce fidgets for a moment, then blurts out, “But _why_ do you have jet-pack armor?” 

Clint, for some reason, seems to think Bruce’s question is hilarious. He snickers into his cereal bowl, and Tony glares, and Bruce is starting to wonder if he could get away with sneaking back to his room, when Tony’s phone rings. Tony keeps scowling at Clint for a second, then looks at the screen. His face lights up.

“So I’m going to go talk to Pepper now,” he says, holding the phone up to his ear. “Hey Bruce, while I’m doing this, why don’t you get Clint to explain the Avengers to you?”

“ _Dude_ ,” says, Clint, and Tony waggles his fingers in a good-bye wave as he walks over to the big glass wall on the far side of the room.

Clint doesn’t look angry, just a little annoyed, but Bruce doesn’t want to push him. No one’s really told him anything about Clint; Steve hadn’t said anything about him being friends with Bruce when he’s an adult, so it’s possible that Clint doesn’t actually like him.

“You don’t have to explain,” Bruce says quietly. “I don’t know what Tony was talking about, anyway.” 

Clint blinks at him. So far he’s seemed distracted, but now it’s like he’s really focusing on Bruce, and it’s kind of disturbing. Then he smiles; it happens suddenly, and it makes some of the harsh lines around his mouth go soft.

“No one’s talked to you about Avengers stuff yet, really?” he says.

Bruce just _said_ that. He shakes his head.

“Um…yeah, so, you know Steve, right?”

Bruce nods.

“So, Cap’s like, a super-soldier, and then—have you met Thor?” Bruce nods again. “Thor is a god or whatever—he’s an alien, super strong, uses a magic hammer to fly around and hit things. Tony has armor, the, uh, Iron Man armor, and then there’s me and Natasha, doing covert ops. We’re the Avengers. Sometimes we stop aliens invading.” Clint scratches the back of his neck. “Actually, now I get why Tony put off explaining. Sounds kind of stupid if you weren’t there.” 

Bruce doesn’t think it sounds stupid. He doesn’t think anything about it at all. 

Earlier that morning, JARVIS had given him a summary of major developments in physics, medicine, and technology over the last thirty years. Bruce had started off trying to trace relationships and connections between those developments and stuff he already knew about and understood. Eventually, though, he’d had to give up. There was too much to take in; he could have just sat there reading for the rest of however long he’s in the future, and he still never would managed to catch up. 

He doesn’t know if this Avengers thing is like that, something he would understand better if he was from 2014, or if Clint is really just that bad at explaining it. 

“Oh.” Clint’s expression brightens. “And then there’s you.”

Bruce tenses automatically.

“I mean, I guess you know about how you turn into the Hulk. He’s part of the gang too.”

“I turn into _what_?”

Clint’s mouth falls open. “Okay, I guess you don’t know. Yeah, so, you kind of have this…alter ego. Massive, green, super strong, limited vocabulary. You’re the big gun. We don’t call you out for every fight, just the ones where we really need you.”

Okay, so now Bruce knows for sure that Clint is making fun of him. He’s not sure what the point is—maybe he just wants to see if Bruce is stupid enough to believe it.

“I’m pretty sure you’re the strongest out of all of us,” Clint goes on. “Thor can slow you down a little, but there’s a bulk issue, and he kind of relies on his hammer. But, you know, a lot of the time we need you in the lab more than in the field, so there’s a system. Code Green, you suit up, otherwise you’re whipping up poison antidotes or figuring out how to dissolve alien slime-goo or whatever.”

Bruce wonders if Clint is just going to keep making shit up until Tony comes back. Bruce tries not to be rude on purpose—he doesn’t like getting into trouble when he can actually help it—but if he gets much angrier, he’s not going to be able to stop himself.

“So yeah, the big guy’s a real team player these days. No unauthorized smashing. Not in awhile, anyway. And that’s the Avengers.” Clint looks past Bruce. “What do you think, does that cover it?”

“Did you mention that we fight crime?” Tony doesn’t have the phone anymore. It must have been a really short conversation. “Actually, crime might be stretching it in some cases. I don’t know if there’s actually an ordinance on the books banning the alien takeover of earth. Evil, we fight evil, let’s go with that.”

“Captain America, Iron Man, Thor—he doesn’t get a codename—Nat’s Black Widow, I’m Hawkeye.” Clint nods at Bruce. “And Hulk.”

“The _Incredible_ Hulk, according to our officially licensed merchandise.” Tony smirks and hops up on a barstool, grabbing a glass with one hand and pouring his soda into it with the other. “And the Invincible Iron Man.”

“Amazing.” Clint jerks a thumb, pointing back at himself. “I’m the Amazing Hawkeye.” He squints at Tony. “Invincible, really? Seems misleading.”

“That’s jealousy, I detect jealousy in your skepticism.”

Bruce doesn’t know what to believe. He’d spent hours yesterday hang around Steve and Natasha, and now that he thinks about it, neither of them had really talked much about Bruce as an adult. Steve had just said that he works with Tony, and Bruce sort of assumed that Steve didn’t know the details—most people don’t really understand what physicists do, and whatever Bruce is working on these days is probably even more complicated than that, since his lab partner is an engineer.

Now, though, he’s wondering if Steve had avoided the subject on purpose. Like maybe there’s something about his adult self Steve was afraid to tell him.

Steve has the serum and Tony apparently built an armor that gives him superpowers. Thor is an alien, and Clint and Natasha are just really good at whatever it is they do. But Bruce…turns into something. What is that even supposed to mean?

The bottle Tony gave him is sweaty, slippery with condensation. Bruce is looking down at it, not really sure how he’s supposed to drink it; Tony didn’t give him a bottle opener and Bruce doesn’t really want to ask. But Tony must be watching him, because a second later Tony is right there, taking the bottle out of his hand and popping the cap with a knife that goes back into his pocket. He hands it back to Bruce, and their eyes meet for a second. There’s a question in Tony’s face, in the arch of his eyebrow.

“Thanks,” Bruce says. He drinks some of the soda. It’s not bad; not what he’s used to, but it’s not gross at all.

A few minutes later, Steve and Natasha show up. They’re carrying the food Tony ordered, having run into the delivery guy in the lobby. Steve smiles when he sees Bruce and squeezes his shoulder; he’s getting used to that, and it doesn’t bother him as much as it did yesterday. Natasha doesn’t touch him, but she gives him a really nice smile. 

Of all the people Bruce has met in 2014, Natasha makes him the least nervous. Maybe it’s because she’s a girl—not that she’s weak or helpless or anything like that, but she doesn’t tower over him the way Steve does, or have biceps the size of his torso, like Tony and Clint. She doesn’t stare at him like she can’t figure out what to say; he doesn’t seem to make _her_ nervous, whereas Tony, at least, seems to find Bruce really unsettling sometimes, and Steve occasionally looks at Bruce like he’s just the saddest thing he’s ever seen, which is really weird. 

Bruce feels like, if he asked Natasha a question, she’d give him a straight answer. Not that he’s had the chance to talk to her like that. They’ve never been alone together, and she and Clint seem to spend less time in the Tower than the others.

She takes up a position close to him as Steve sets the table and lines the cartons of food up on the bar. When everybody heads over to fill their plates, she sort of nudges Bruce to join the line without really touching him. Quietly, she identifies the mysterious heaps of food for Bruce’s benefit: ziti, veal parmigiana, breaded clams, breadsticks, mozzarella sticks, and then a huge dish of tiramisu and about twenty cannoli. Bruce isn’t really hungry, but Natasha fixes him with her gaze until his plate is loaded up. 

Even when he has his food, he tries to hang back until everyone else has taken a seat, but then Natasha is at his back again, herding him towards the chair next to Steve. Bruce sits down, and Natasha sits down on his other side, and hands him a napkin. 

It’s weird to Bruce, how they’re all hanging out together, eating lunch like a family. They’re adults, so no one’s making them do it, and it’s strange to think that maybe they just like it this way. Bruce hasn’t eaten a meal at a table with other people in years. He remembers doing it when he was little, him and his parents, but these days Dad gets home from work so late that he and Mom don’t really bother anymore. Mostly Bruce takes a plate to his room and eats at his desk while he’s studying. 

He has a hard time concentrating on the food. He’s forgotten all the little things, like which side of his plate his drink goes on, and where, exactly, he’s supposed to put his napkin, and it makes him feel self-conscious, even though none of the others seem to care much about table manners. Clint’s got his elbow propped up on the table, next to his plate, so he can lean his head against his hand. Natasha’s chair is pushed back from the table; her legs are cross at the knees, and she’s holding her phone in one hand and a breadstick in the other. Steve is shoveling his food down so fast that Bruce wonders if he’s even chewing. And Tony has a tablet propped up behind his plate; there’s a fork in his hand, but he’s not really doing anything with it.

They all seem preoccupied, but they still talk to each other. Sometimes the conversation lags, but the silence isn’t awkward, just busy. Once Bruce realizes that no one is paying much attention to him, he starts to relax, let their voices wash over him. It’s nice not having to worry about being asked a question he won’t be able to answer.

He wonders if they eat together like this when he’s an adult, or if his being here now has changed the pattern of their lives. He sort of hopes they do. He thinks he could get used to living like this—close to other people, just part of a group. Bruce never wanted brothers or sisters, but if he had them, maybe it would be like this at home: lots of people doing their own thing, no one watching him.

“You guys have plans for tonight?” Steve says, after he’s cleaned his plate and started on second helpings of everything. “I was thinking maybe we could take Bruce out to see a movie.”

Bruce looks over at Steve in surprise.

“What movie?” says Clint.

“I don’t know. Whatever’s playing.” Steve smiles at Bruce. “The movies they have now are incredible. A little violent, but the special effects are something else.”

“Sounds good,” says Natasha. She doesn’t seem to be eating anything except the garlic breadsticks, but she’s eaten at least five of those. “What do you think, Bruce? Want to see a movie with us?”

“Um…” Bruce glances at Tony, who’s sitting directly across from him. So far, Tony hasn’t made any rules for him, except the one about sticking close to other people, but he does sort of seem to be in charge—at least, this is his home, and Tony is the one who’s working on sending Bruce back, so maybe Tony will need him for tests or something. 

But Tony doesn’t seem to notice him looking; he doesn’t even seem to be listening. His eyes are fixed on his tablet, and he’s been chewing the same bite of breaded clam for the last minute.

“There’s that spy one,” says Clint. “Some sort of World War II thing?”

Natasha arches an eyebrow. “ _The Imitation Game_ , Clint? Really?”

“What? It’s got computers and shit. Fun for the whole family!”

No one says anything for a second, and then Tony’s head jerks up. He looks so startled that Bruce wonders if someone kicked him under the table. 

“Movie. Good idea,” he says loudly. “Not me, I’m busy. Bring me back some Junior Mints.”

He doesn’t look at Bruce, and Bruce can’t decide if that means he’s unhappy with the idea of Bruce going out or if his mind is just on other things.

“Also,” Steve says to Bruce, “movie-theater candy is much better.”

“What he said.” Tony pushes back from the table, carrying his plate into the kitchen. As he passes Bruce’s chair, he rests his hand between Bruce’s shoulder blades—just a quick, sure touch that, for some reason, makes Bruce feel warm, steady, like whatever he decides to do, Tony doesn’t mind.

“Paint the town red, kids,” Tony says, picking his tablet up and heading out of the room. “Seriously, with the Junior Mints,” he calls over his shoulder.

Natasha snorts delicately, and Bruce looks over at her. She shakes her head. “It’s always something with him.”

Bruce has no idea what to say to that, but Steve is starting to clear the table, so he decides to go help with the dishes. He knows how to do that, at least. He’s good at helping with chores.

 

*

Tony is on the phone with Thor when Bruce finds his way back down to the lab later that night.

For all he knew, a trip to the movies lasted five, six, ten hours? He figured he had a window. He didn’t expect Bruce to come looking for him, whatever time he got back to the Tower. They’d made it clear to him that he wasn’t supposed to wander off on his own, and while Tony was the kind of kid who bucked authority for the sake of letting everyone know who was boss, Bruce isn’t like that. Bruce, Tony is pretty sure, is the kid who does what he’s told unless he has a good reason not to.

The thing is, Tony had forgotten about promising Bruce a tour of his fabrication workshop after he got back from the movies. He’d forgotten that he said that to Bruce in front of Clint, who would have vouched for him to Steve. He’d forgotten that JARVIS also overheard him, and that JARVIS had received no orders from Tony that would prevent him from cooperating with Bruce’s request to show him the way back to the workshop and unlocking the door for him.

So when Bruce slips into the workshop, silent and invisible, while Tony is on speakerphone with Thor, Tony doesn’t notice, and Bruce doesn’t draw attention to himself, because he’s too fucking polite to interrupt. Which is how he overhears absolutely everything.

“I sent word to you by Steve yesterday evening,” Thor says, while Tony grits his teeth. “Jane is ill and cannot speak to anyone.”

“Yeah, I hear what you’re saying, and I’m sorry she feels like crap.” Tony opens an Amazon window on his tablet. “Honestly, the biggest fucking get-well-soon gift basket on the planet is headed Foster’s way as we speak. But I just need her for five minutes. If she’s even remotely lucid, I need—I gotta ask her some questions. Whatever happened to Bruce, she’s the only person who knows what he was working on, and I’m doing my best here, but I just, I’ve got nothing. Nothing, Thor, you understand?”

Thor is imperious, but he has that stately, old-world courtesy about him. You can trust him to take certain things seriously: the safety of a teammate matters to him. On the other hand, he is insanely protective of Foster, so Tony counts it as a win when Thor says, “One moment. I will see what I can do.”

At the point, Tony hears a slight shuffling noise somewhere behind him, but his hypervigilance has scaled down a few notches lately, so he doesn’t investigate it right away. He’s got other things on his mind.

When Thor gets back on the line, his voice is heavy with regret. “I am sorry, Tony. She sleeps for the present. When she wakes, I promise that I will present your request to her.”

Tony sighs explosively, and the it comes out like a hiss. “Yeah. Okay, fine.”

“How does the young Bruce fare?”

“He’s, you know. He’s twelve, and that’s—that’s a situation that needs to change. I need to fix this. We’re not, I’m not equipped—kids, I don’t do kids, they’re a special kind of headache, you know what I mean?”

Something small but heavy crashes behind him. A wrench, maybe, Tony’s knocked enough wrenches off his workbench to know what it sounds like when they clatter to the floor. He spins around, and that’s when he sees—

Bruce is standing a few feet inside the door, holding onto the edge of a workbench like he’d stumbled and caught himself.

His eyes are huge and as soon as Tony turns around he starts backing towards the door again. It is horribly like the moment he first burst into the penthouse last night.

“Call me back,” Tony orders Thor, and cuts the call. 

“I’m sorry,” says Bruce immediately, and he’s still backing up. The door locks automatically, but unless Tony orders him not to, JARVIS will open it as soon as Bruce tries to leave. “I’m sorry, you said—I thought I was supposed to—”

“Bruce, it’s fine.” He’s having a very hard time not rushing towards Bruce, because he’s replaying the last sixty seconds of the call in his head, and he doesn’t even have to divert mental energy to wonder what Bruce thinks about what he overheard, because it is right there in his eyes.

Tony as good as said that he wants to get rid of Bruce, but can’t. That’s not what Tony meant, but that’s what Bruce thinks, and no wonder he looks like he wants to run.

Tony is deeply aware that the last time Bruce ran away from them, the only reason they caught up with him was because he was panicking and in a strange environment. Now that he knows the Tower, knows the team, knows what JARVIS is capable of, he won’t be so easy to catch.

And if he manages to make it out of the Tower—well, they already know that Bruce is a genius at disappearing.

It takes every once of restraint Tony possesses to back up a few paces and sit down on the bench. He doesn’t take his eyes off Bruce the whole time.

“Come on in,” he says.

Bruce doesn’t move.

“Please.” Casually, Tony picks up his tablet again and enters a lockdown order. JARVIS silently locks the door of the lab behind Bruce.

He keeps his head down until he hears the whispering shuffle of feet approach. When he looks up from the tablet, Bruce is standing about ten feet away from him.

Tony smiles, a genuine smile of relief, and scoots down on the bench so that Bruce can have a seat without getting having to get too close to him. He calls up the University of New Mexico website and holds the tablet out to Bruce. Slowly, blinking at him from behind his glasses, Bruce reaches out to take it.

“Jane Foster.” Bruce looks up. “Steve said she was Thor’s girlfriend.”

“Yeah. But more importantly, she’s your adult-self’s long distance research partner.”

Bruce’s forehead wrinkles. “Why would I need to work with an astrophysicist?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t _know_.” He doesn’t snap, exactly, but the frustration is thick in his voice.

“No, I mean—you, right now, if you had a chance to sit down with an astrophysicist and geek out together to your heart’s content, what would you want to talk about?”

Bruce shakes his head. His fingers tighten on the tablet’s case.

“Okay. It’s okay. It was just a thought.” Tony holds his hand out and Bruce almost shoves the tablet back at him. “I was just thinking—when I was your age, the stuff I was interested in is pretty much the same stuff I’m working on now. Circuit boards, robots, AI. But, now that I think about it, you’re actually way less predictable than me, so…” He shrugs.

Bruce’s mouth is a flat, thin line. “You think Dr. Foster can tell you how to fix me?”

He’s not doing anything but repeating what Tony was just saying to Thor, but Tony does not, at all, like the way those words sound in Bruce’s mouth.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he says.

“Yes, there is.”

The emptiness of Bruce’s tone, the readiness of his answer, makes Tony think that he’s not talking about being twelve.

“Sit down for a second.” Bruce looks at him. “Please. You’re taller than me like that, I don’t like it when people loom over me.”

It’s supposed to be a joke, because sitting down, Tony is about the same height as Bruce standing. Bruce doesn’t smile, but he does sit—not astride the bench, like Tony, but facing outward.

“Okay. So I think that, with everything that’s going on, there’s an important conversation we haven’t had yet. My fault; I’m easily distracted. But I think we should have it now so there’s no misunderstanding.” Tony looks down so Bruce doesn’t feel his eyes boring into the side of his head. “You know you’re not a burden here, right?”

Bruce is very, very still, and very quiet.

“I’m worried about the adult you,” Tony continues. “Because I don’t know what’s happened to him. I don’t know if he’s gone somewhere, if he’s stuck, maybe. He’s my friend and I need to know he’s okay, and my best guess for how to do that is to figure out what brought you here.”

Bruce nods once, tightly.

“That is not the same thing wanting to get rid of _you_.”

Tony would give just about anything to know what Bruce is thinking, but if he knows anything by now, it’s that he’s not going to get that information by pressuring Bruce to talk. Even at this age, he says what he’s ready for other people to hear, and nothing more.

“Can I ask you a question?” Bruce shrugs. “Do you _want_ to go back home?”

The turn of Bruce’s head is quick, startled, and the expression on his face says that he thinks he’s been caught. 

Tony feels like he’s in free-fall. That carefully constructed barrier around Bruce’s past has given way, and Tony is plunging headfirst into someone else’s nightmare. It’s the most helpless he’s felt in a very long time.

“It doesn’t matter what I want,” says Bruce quickly, like he knows he’s given himself away.

“It absolutely matters. It matters to me.”

“I’m not supposed to be here. I’m not— _he’s_ your friend, not me.”

“But you’re him.” Tony spreads his hands at Bruce’s scornful look. “You look different, I’ll grant you. You’re a little shorter. You’re not up to date on your pop culture references. But when I look at you, Bruce, I see a person that I—I see someone I care about. However this thing works, whether you now and you at 44 are co-existing or not, you aren’t two people to me. You’re just Bruce, and Bruce Banner belongs here.”

Even as Tony says it, he realizes that he has had this exact conversation with Bruce at least five times since the day they met. It’s usually about the Hulk, but this sensation of _willing_ Bruce to just accept the fact that he’s wanted and needed in Tony’s life, that part is achingly familiar.

Understanding, as he does now, that Bruce has been almost impossible to reach on this particular subject since he was a child does not make Tony feel more patient. It just makes him furious.

“I _have_ to go back.” Bruce isn’t looking at him anymore. A little louder, he says, “You don’t want a kid here anyway.”

“I did not mean that the way it sounded. Hey, come on. I am not lying to you.”

“I heard you. What else was that _supposed_ to mean?”

Natasha had warned him about this. She’d told him not to lie; she’d told him that Bruce could see through him, see through all them. 

“It means that I don’t know how to keep you from getting hurt,” Tony says.

The confusion on Bruce’s face, bordering on incredulity, would be funny under different circumstances.

“Kids need—things. Qualities, in an adult, that I do not have. Responsibility, consistent meal times, any awareness of what constitutes age-appropriate activities. I barely manage to take care of myself, Bruce, so forgive me if I’m worried that I might fuck up, where you’re concerned.”

He starts to miss the confused, contemptuous expression when Bruce starts looking miserable and resigned instead. 

Tony actually understands this. All Tony’s life, people told him that his father loved him, that his father was proud of him, that he just didn’t know how to connect with Tony but that didn’t mean that Howard didn’t think the world of him, blah blah. All Tony ever got out of this was that his father wasn’t the one saying any of it.

“Here’s the thing, though. None of that matters.” Tony takes a deep breath, aware that he is about to make a promise he doesn’t know if he can keep. “What I said to Thor, it was true, but it’s not important. This is the only thing you need to know. As long as you’re here, this is your home. No one is getting rid of you. If I can’t find a way to send you back, if you turn thirteen and fourteen and thirty in the 21st century, then that’s what happens. We’re keeping you, regardless. All I need from you is one promise.”

Bruce is staring at Tony and every trace of defensiveness, of pre-teen superiority and mistrust, is gone, wiped clean by shock. There is, Tony thinks, a hint of disbelief in there as well; there is also a trace of cautious hope.

“What…” He wets his lips. “What kind of promise?”

“If this is gonna work, I need you to trust me.”

Suspicion curves the corner of Bruce’s mouth down into a frown.

“I get that we sort of just met, but…” Tony ruffles the back his head, tries to remember how long it’s been since he had a shower. He didn’t sleep last night; he doesn’t know if he’s going to be able to sleep until he has some more answers. “Look, you’re a scientist. Not adult-you, _you_. Your mind already works that way. You form a hypothesis and then you wait on the evidence. You’re not really about taking leaps of faith. And that’s, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, I’m the same way. But when it comes to this—to us—I’m gonna need you to leap a little.”

“I don’t know what that means,” says Bruce, and for once he doesn’t sound stubborn, just lost.

“It means…” Now Tony is at a loss. “It means, okay. Just—for example. Let’s say something’s bothering you, but your first instinct is not to tell anybody. You’ve got your reasons for that. You don’t know how me or Steve or Nat might react. Maybe it’ll be cool, or maybe we’ll—maybe you think we’re gonna get angry, or just handle the situation differently than you would have. So you don’t say anything. You want to wait until you’ve observed us long enough to establish a baseline for a predictive model of our behavior. With me so far?”

Bruce moves his head so incrementally that you could barely call it a nod.

“What I’m asking you to do,” Tony says, and then his voice cracks, because he’s sitting here, explaining how trust works to a genius, and it is blazingly obvious that he finds the whole concept utterly alien, and it makes Tony wonder. It makes him think about adult Bruce, wherever he is right now, and whether, when he comes back (if he comes back) he is going to have these memories. If Tony is—somehow—altering the course of his destiny just by being with him like this, at this age, while his brain is still growing and his ideas about the world are unsettled.

The ethics of this situation are completely beyond him, except in one sense: there is a child in front of him who tried to jump off a balcony 24 hours ago because he thought he was in the power of people who were going to hurt him. And that can’t happen again. Whatever the consequences, whatever clusterfuck of hurricanes and butterfly wings and dead grandfathers Tony is stirring up here, there is a child in front of him who needs reassurance.

He can’t—he won’t—worry about anything else right now.

“What I’m asking you to do,” he says, “in a situation like that, is to talk to us anyway. Even though you don’t know how we’re going to react. Even if you think there’s a chance that we’ll use the information you’ve given us to make a choice that’s different than you would have made. I’m asking you to—to test the hypothesis that we’re going to look after you, no matter what, even if that means you have to run some dangerous experiments.”

Bruce’s hands are on his knees, and then his hands are folded together, his left thumb running steadily across his knuckles. 

“Can you promise me that?” Tony asks, and he’s terrified, really, of what Bruce’s answer will be, because this is the line. Once they’ve crossed it, things will be different. Forever, however long that is.

Bruce sits there, fidgeting, until the pressure in Tony’s chest has built to unbearable levels.

“Are you asking me about Dad?” says Bruce, finally.

Relief triggers a rapid depressurization that makes Tony’s stomach sink to about the level of his bowels. 

Quietly, he says, “I am if you’re ready to tell me.”


	6. Chapter 6

Steve goes to find Tony late that evening, after Bruce is in bed, and Natasha and Clint are wherever they’ve gone for the night. He finds him in the common room kitchen, drunk.

One of the more surprising things Steve has discovered after living with Tony for most of a year is that he drinks a lot less than he appears to. Either that, or his tolerance is too high for the amount of drinking he does to affect his behavior. Either way, despite the fact there there’s a glass in his hand more often than not, it’s fairly rare for Steve to find him genuinely incapacitated. Steve doesn’t know why Tony plays drunk even when he isn’t, but he’s stopped questioning it. 

At any rate, he’s not playing tonight.

“Steve.” Tony waves the glass at him as he walks in.

“Hi Tony.” He assesses the tableau before him: the half-empty bottle of scotch, the way Tony leans on one elbow and stares out at the empty room. Tony’s eyes are puffy and red-rimmed, and his color isn’t good. “Is everything okay?”

“Sure.”

He’s also stopped questioning the fact that, when presented with direct questions regarding his well-being, Tony’s answer will always be some kind of lie.

“Did you…how is Bruce?”

“Sleeping. Probably. Maybe he’s faking. Reading under the covers with a flashlight. Or JARVIS is reading to him.” Tony smiles, and he must not realize that he’s doing it, because the smile is soft and genuine and not at all defensive. “He talks to JARVIS, you know.”

“Don’t we all?” Moving quietly, Steve takes a seat on the other side of the bar, across and a few places down from Tony.

“No, I mean—Bruce asks him questions. About his code, about his programming. He’s interested in his personality module. He—he asks my AI _personal questions_. He wants to know how JARVIS feels about things.”

That makes Steve pause. “Does JARVIS have feelings?”

“Close enough.” Tony laughs, and it isn’t like the smile; there’s something ugly there. “He’s worried about how I treat him.”

That makes a little more sense. “Bruce is afraid of you?”

“No—I mean, maybe, but not—he’s worried about how I treat _JARVIS_. He’s all about, you know—” Tony waves his glass. “Rights for artificial intelligences. He’s worried that I alter JARVIS’s code against his will.”

Steve doesn’t know how to reply to that. By default, he tends to address JARVIS like he’s a person; Tony has made fun of him for saying please and thank you, but that’s more out of habit than because Steve has thought deeply about whether JARVIS benefits from courtesy the way that a human would.

“Bruce is really curious about the future,” Steve says. “He’s probably more comfortable asking JARVIS questions than the rest of us, because…”

He doesn’t really know how to finish that sentence. Not because he doesn’t have some idea of why, exactly, Bruce would be more relaxed talking to someone who doesn’t have a face or a body, but because of the way Tony looks right now.

Tony puts on a good show, but he takes things really personally. He blames himself, somehow, for Bruce turning into a child, even though Steve believes him when he said that he doesn’t know how it happened. Steve guesses that has something to do with how rich and how smart Tony is. He’s used to being able to use those things to make problems go away. 

Steve didn’t like Tony much when they first met, but that had started to change around the same time he realized how much responsibility Tony feels for problems that have nothing to do with him.

“JARVIS is going to replace me.” Tony snorts. “He’s going to break up with me and start calling Bruce ‘sir’. He thinks Bruce is the finest specimen of young humanhood ever.”

Steve smiles, because in some ways Tony is genuinely vulnerable, and in others he’s just hilariously insecure. “Are you jealous?”

“No.” 

He doesn’t sound offended, but he’s not running with the joke either. 

On its own, the drinking doesn’t worry Steve, but he’s starting to think that there is something to worry about, maybe.

“So what did you and Bruce talk about?” he asks. “He’s a really smart kid—I know it’s not the same as having Dr. Banner around, but I thought—”

“Yeah, about that. Don’t, uh.” Tony pushes himself upright and meets Steve’s eyes for a second. The bleak look he finds there startles him. “Bruce can’t help. Not with this. So you shouldn’t…he thinks it’s his fault.”

“Did I say something wrong?”

“Not exactly. He just—he doesn’t want to disappoint people.” 

Steve doesn’t understand, but he doesn’t need to. “Okay. I won’t say anything else to him about it.”

Tony nods. Then he screw up his face and tips the contents of the glass back.

“So I guess you didn’t find anything out tonight. Or you wouldn’t be up here…” Steve indicates the bottle. “Hanging out.”

“That’s not the problem,” says Tony.

“What’s the problem, then?”

“I got sidetracked. By a…” he laughs, and Steve had thought that the first time he laughed, it sounded ugly, but now he realizes, it isn’t mockery he’s hearing. It’s something worse. Despair, maybe. “Philosophical problem.”

Steve’s eyebrows fly to his hairline. “Philosophical.”

“Ethical. Moral…thing.”

It isn’t that Steve doesn’t think of Tony as a moral person, but he’s never thought of him as someone who agonizes over moral issues. He’s always seemed confident in making snappy judgment calls. And even though Steve sometimes disagrees with the calls he makes, he’s never doubted that Tony’s decisions come from a place of wanting, first and foremost, to help and protect other people as much as he possibly can. Which is another way of saying that he’s always—almost always—had confidence in Tony’s moral code.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Steve offers. Tony blinks, and he adds, hastily, “I want to help. So far I’ve been pretty useless—I can watch out for Bruce, but I can’t help you at all with the science, so if this is about something else, maybe I would understand. You shouldn’t have to be the only person responsible, here. I know you kind of have to be, at least until Jane is better, but if you just need to talk…”

Tony has started nodding before Steve has even finished, so he just stops talking. Waits on Tony.

Tony eyes his empty glass for a second. Steve watches him make the decision to fill it again, and to down the contents in a single swallow. He doesn’t grimace this time. He slides the glass aside and sits there quietly, one minute, two minutes. Steve doesn’t say anything; he guesses Tony is waiting to feel sufficiently numb before he says whatever he’s thinking about.

“Bruce doesn’t want to go back,” he says.

Steve figures that Tony expects him to be shocked by this, but he isn’t, really.

“He likes it here.” Tony shakes his head, like he finds this unbelievable. “And it’s not about being a geeky kid in a future where flying robot armor exists, thought that’s…I guess that sweetens it for him. It’s more than that, though. It’s about where he comes from.”

_Don’t you mean_ when, Steve thinks, but he doesn’t say it, because he thinks maybe that’s not what Tony means at all.

“I can’t figure out how this works,” Tony goes on. “Not just, how do I fix it; I don’t know if he’s a shorter version of our Bruce, or if the other Bruce is somewhere in spacetime, trying to get back here. I don’t know if this Bruce is going to keep his memories or not. Are we gonna send him back to the eighties, knowing that 9/11 is coming, that he really needs to buy some early stock in Apple and Microsoft? Does he make the same choices, knowing what he knows about his future, does he maybe go to medical school instead of getting a Ph.D. in physics? I don’t know. I don’t know any of that, and it’s…” Tony gestures towards his head and waggles his fingers. “It’s making me, you know, I like linear causality, that’s what engineers are good at. Our brains weren’t meant to think in four dimensions.”

Steve understands what he’s saying. He understands, probably, better than Tony realizes he does, because Steve is a little like Bruce, unstuck in time, and he’s wondered—actually, he’s been wondering a lot the last two days whether, once they figure out how to send Bruce back to his own time, there is a chance that _Steve_ could—

He has fantasies where he gets to go back, knowing what he knows now about Hydra, about Howard, and yes, about 9/11 and all the rest of it, and changing what he can. Arriving in the 21st century in the normal way, knowing that it’s a better and safer time, because of him.

Steve’s not a scientist, not that he thinks scientists are all of one mind about this sort of thing. Bruce, he’s fairly certain, would tell Steve that reality doesn’t work that way, that there are always more problems, that you can’t fix the future. _Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,_ Steve thinks, though Bruce would set his hair on fire before he’d ever quote scripture. 

The thing is, Steve sort of thought that Tony would be the opposite; that Tony would tell him to fight like hell using everything he had, including illicit knowledge of how events might play out differently, because Tony isn’t abstract, like Bruce. Tony is all about fixing the problem that’s in front of him, using whatever tools he possesses.

On the whole, Steve is mostly grateful that it’s not a decision he’s ever likely to have to make. But that, of course, is the whole issue—Tony does have to make that choice. At least, even if he lets Steve weigh in, he’s the one who ultimately has to decide whether take action, or not.

And it’s worse, because it’s not about some hypothetical big picture of world events. It’s about Bruce, their friend. It’s about wanting him back, and from Tony’s perspective, it’s also about the life Bruce has led, which, Steve doesn’t know all the details, but he knows that Bruce has suffered. But it all led to them coming together here, and that’s not something Steve would want to change. In the simplest possible terms, he doesn’t want to lose the Bruce he knows.

The big picture is relevant, though. If Bruce’s life changes so much that he doesn’t become the Hulk—

Yeah, Steve can see how Tony is getting tangled up in the ethics, here.

“He turned the tide against the Chitauri,” Steve says, not because he feels that this is the most important issue on the table, but because he figures someone needs to say it out loud. “I don’t know that we were going to win that one without him. And he…I mean, when you fell…”

Tony looks at him with red eyes. His hands are trembling slightly, and that might be the alcohol, but Steve doesn’t think that it is.

“That—” Tony blinks. “You know what, I wasn’t even thinking about that.”

“It’s something to think about,” says Steve gently. 

“Yeah, I guess.” Tony reaches for his glass again. “Actually, I’m more worried about what his father will do to him if I send him back.”

Steve had been about to reach for the bottle, pull it away, but as soon as the words are out of Tony’s mouth he forgets.

“The black eye?” he says.

“That’s—yeah. I mean, tip of the iceberg, but yeah. The black eye.”

Steve breathes out slowly. “Bruce doesn’t want to go home because he’s not safe there.” Anger boils up from the pit of his stomach, but his hands feel weak, like if he tried to lift a glass, or a bottle, they would just slip out of his hands, crack and spill over the counter top. He should have known, he thinks. He _did_ know, on some level, but he’d sidestepped the awareness, because…

There’s no good excuse, is there?

“He didn’t go into a whole lot of detail, but he was pretty clear about the basic situation. He was in—his dad, you know, Brian Banner—I guess you wouldn’t know, actually, but my dad knew who he was. He was a physicist. He was good. He was brilliant, actually—not in Bruce’s league, but that, that was part of the problem.” Tony drinks. Steve watches the knot of his throat bob as he tilts his head back and swallows long and deep. He puts the glass down hard and looks Steve right in the eye. 

“Howard didn’t hit me, you know,” he says, and Steve wants to touch him, suddenly. Just his shoulder, or his arm, but Tony would never allow it. “Or he did, but it was just—I wasn’t in danger, like that. Banner killed his wife. I didn’t know; I looked at Bruce’s file a second ago. What if I change his past by sending him back to the wrong moment? What if it’s not the wife this time, what if—”

Steve feels sick to his stomach, but Tony is about to spiral into some kind of meltdown. He’s drunk, which is probably why he permits it when Steve reaches across the bar for Tony’s hand and grips it tight. 

For a second they just sit there like that, unwelcome knowledge settling like dust over their thoughts.

Steve understands, suddenly, why he’s the one Tony is telling this to. Not because he was the one who happened to walk in on him hours after finding out, but because Steve, Tony has always said, is the one who sees things in black and white. He’s counting on Steve to have a straightforward answer; maybe not one that either of them likes, but one that he’s confident in.

Tony overestimates him. Steve has settled into a leadership role, but he isn’t arrogant enough to give orders when he’s plainly in over his head.

He lets go of Tony’s hand—slowly, so it doesn’t feel like a rejection—and eases back.

“You don’t even know if you’ll be able to send him back yet,” Steve points out, because acknowledging that your hands are tied in the face of an impossible decision can be a kind of comfort.

“Yeah, but.” Tony blinks at him, and it makes him look a lot younger, somehow, like he’s closer to Steve’s age. “I can’t just stop looking. I can’t—our Bruce might still be out there, and I’m not, I can’t just let myself off the hook. That’s not how this works.”

It would be a lot easier on all of them, probably, to do nothing. But that’s never been Tony’s way. That’s part of why Steve has come to respect him.

“You know Bruce better than anyone,” Steve says. “If he was in your shoes—” 

Tony’s face hardens suddenly. “The last fucking person I would trust with Bruce Banner’s safety is Bruce Banner,” he says, low and bitter.

Anyone listening to them would probably assume that it’s Bruce he’s angry with.

“What if it was you?” Steve is braced for an explosion, but he picked his comparison deliberately. Tony can play it down as much he likes, but Steve isn’t fooled; he knows Howard left a lot to be desired as a father, and the desire to maybe give Tony a different kind of childhood has featured in a few of Steve’s fantasies about returning to his own time. “What would Dr. Banner do if you were the one who was twelve?”

Tony’s eyes widen slightly, but his mouth only hardens more.

“It isn’t the same thing,” he says, and Steve is prepared to argue with him, but then he says, “Bruce would actually know what he was doing.”

Steve thinks he understands a little of what Tony feels about the adult Bruce, because it’s more or less the same way Steve feels about Tony. He doesn’t have an expansive vocabulary for the complexities of the situation, but if pressed, he would just say that Tony is way too damn hard on himself.

It’s excruciating, not to have any answers, not to be able to fix things for the friend in front of him who’s hurting. For either of his friends. But Steve is like Tony; he can’t just do nothing.

So he sits with him. Steve sits there, at the bar, until Tony is so weak and tired with overwork and scotch that he slides off the stool onto wobbly feet. Then Steve walks over and gives him a shoulder; half carries him to the elevator, and to bed.

When there’s nothing you can do, Steve has always believed, you just do whatever you can. 

 

*

The common room kitchen is deserted when Bruce goes looking for breakfast the next morning. He’d expected that; Steve wakes up really early, and Natasha and Clint stay up really late, and Tony doesn’t really have a schedule, but since Bruce got here he’s spent most of his time, including meals, in the lab or the workshop.

It’s not big deal. Bruce can pour his own cereal. He’s got the tablet Tony gave him, so he can just sit here at the table and read while he eats. It works out, actually, because he doesn’t want to talk out loud to JARVIS about this stuff—someone could overhear them. JARVIS is networked with the tablet, so he _knows_ , but he won’t tell Tony unless Tony specifically asks, and Bruce doesn’t think he will ask. Anyway, no one actually told Bruce he couldn’t research this. 

On the other hand, Bruce isn’t about to ask permission. He’s not stupid; he knows that Clint and Tony only told him as much about his adult self, about the Hulk, as they thought he was ready to hear. They didn’t want him to get too curious; or if he was curious, they wanted to be the ones who answered his questions. The thing about Bruce, though, is that he prefers to gather data firsthand.

Anyway, now that he’s reading his file, he can see how Steve, at least, wouldn’t consider it appropriate reading for someone his age.

Back when he first met Steve and Thor in the lab, JARVIS had said that Bruce _transformed_ into his present state, and something about that word had really upset Steve. He wasn’t sure what to make of it, until yesterday, when Clint said that he _turned into_ the Hulk. So now, Bruce is looking for the details: there must have been some kind of process, some kind of experiment, the resulted in the Hulk’s creation. He’d been prepared for the possibility that the technical details would be over his head, but now that he’s doing the reading, that isn’t the problem.

The problem is that the files he has access to don’t really talk about the science at all. There are references to an experiment; he was under contract to the military at the time, and Bruce would love to know how _that_ happened, because unlike his father, he’d never wanted…but there are no details. If anyone’s studying him from the scientific angle, that information must be in a different file.

All Bruce has managed to unearth from Tony’s servers are tactical assessments of the Hulk as a fighter—theories about how strong he is, how dangerous. The file says that he’s _invulnerable_ and _his strength has no measurable upper limit_ and that _the transformations are triggered by extreme emotional states, including rage._ None of which _means_ anything. Bruce wants the _data_.

The file isn’t even clear about what the Hulk is: whether he’s Bruce, or whether he’s something else that just lives in Bruce’s body. He doesn’t understand how no one knows. What has he been doing all this time, if not studying his _condition_ or whatever? 

Once the file starts going in more detail about his recent history, however, Bruce starts to understand a little better. Apparently, in between the original experiment and the big fight with the aliens in 2013, the older Bruce just disappeared. The file says that the army was chasing him, and that Bruce was hiding. So he probably didn’t have access to a lab or anything. It looks like his whole career after the Hulk just sort of came to a stop. He hasn’t made any famous discoveries; he’s supposedly an expert in gamma radiation, but no one really cares about that. According to this assessment, the Hulk is his only accomplishment.

Except he’s not an accomplishment. He’s an accident. And Bruce can’t even control him, apparently. 

After the first couple of bites of his breakfast, Bruce just forgets about it, lets the cereal get soggy. He’s not hungry anymore; he feels like he’s going crazy.

He wants to know about the original experiment. He wants to understand how this _happened_. It doesn’t make sense; it isn’t normal. Bruce’s body shouldn’t be able to do that, no one’s should.

And Tony had lied to him—or at least, yesterday, they’d talked for hours about how Bruce ended up here, whether it was time travel or some kind of reverse-aging process; Tony had listened while Bruce explained that you couldn’t just shed mass that way, and for some reason Tony hadn’t bothered to mention that, that as the Hulk, Bruce accumulates and sheds mass _all the time_. 

Dad used to say that Bruce was a mutant, and that was why he was smarter than he ought to be. Bruce had never really taken him all that seriously, because, deep down, he didn’t think Dad really believed it; Dad just got angry and said things sometimes. 

Now, though, Bruce is starting to wonder if he was right.

Ever since he talked to Tony last night, Bruce has been thinking. Tony said that he was into robots as a kid, and now he makes AI programs and robotic armor. Bruce isn’t like that; he doesn’t have a clear focus yet. He’s interested in a lot of things, but none of them, as far as he knows, would lead him to something like the Hulk.

Maybe he’s just really into biochemistry when he’s older. Or maybe…

The thing is, Bruce was already grown up when he transformed into the Hulk for the first time. 

And a few days ago, Bruce was trying to accelerate his growth, but the machine hadn’t worked, and as soon as he’d woken up here he’d realized what a stupid idea it had been. So it doesn’t make any sense that he would _still_ be working on crap like when he’s older. Not unless, maybe, he was sick or something—weak, small, like Captain America had been before the serum.

If he was sick as an adult, then maybe Bruce could understand it—doing that kind of research, trying to make himself stronger. But the files don’t say anything about him being sick, so all Bruce can think of is that, if he’s still doing that kind of research, then it must because, deep down, he’s still afraid.

That’s not how being an adult is supposed to feel. The whole point of growing up is supposed to be that things _get better_.

He pushes his cereal bowl out of the way, a little too hard; some of the milk splashes over the side and onto the counter. 

The next file is about him, biographical details about his life leading up to the accident. It’s just a couple of pages, there at the very end of the complete report, like Bruce himself is just an footnote compared to the thing he turns into.

As soon as he opens that file, he sees a photograph of a woman. At first, all Bruce sees is the long, dark hair, and he thinks it’s his mom, but then he looks again. He stops reading for a second and just…stares. 

She’s pretty; so pretty that she doesn’t look like a real person, more like a movie star or something. She has big blue eyes and a soft smile, and her hair is like ink against the white lab coat she’s wearing. 

Her name is Dr. Betty Ross, a biochemist. The file says that she was also Bruce’s girlfriend. Until the Hulk happened. 

Bruce has to read the next paragraph twice. Not because he doesn’t believe what it says, but because the knowledge is sinking down inside him, so deeply that even though it hasn’t happened for him yet, it feels like something Bruce has always known about himself. 

The Hulk had hurt her. _Bruce_ hurts her. Puts her in the hospital, and she lives, but she doesn’t wake up for a long time, and her father—

So that’s why the army is chasing him.

He hurts people. There’s something inside Bruce that hurts people, and he can’t control it, can’t stop it, even when he wants to.

There is a casualty estimate of all the people the Hulk has killed in the report, and Bruce doesn’t want to look. He doesn’t want to, but he does; he can’t help it.

When Bruce sees the number, he understands, suddenly, why everyone in the Tower looked like they were afraid of him at first. Why he’s not allowed to go anywhere on his own. Why everyone had lied to him.

They’re not really his friends at all, are they?

He’s staring at the tablet so hard that he doesn’t notice at first when Steve walks into the kitchen. When he does notice, he doesn’t look up. He wants to just sink into the floor, or put his arms over his head and hide. But it’s too late for that; Steve is walking over to the table, standing to the side and looking down at him. 

“Bruce?” he says quietly.

Bruce doesn’t know what kind of face he’s making—he’s kind of numb, and he doesn’t feel like he could move or talk, even if he wanted to—but whatever he looks like, it makes Steve hover at his side, like he’s worried. 

“Is anything wrong?” Steve says.

Bruce guesses that everybody who lives in the Tower must get really nervous when they can’t tell what he’s thinking. 

It never made sense to Bruce, why he lives here, with Tony, and with _Captain America_. He’d thought he must have won a Nobel, or that he’d invented something with Tony—but even then, he knew there was something he was missing.

He gets it now. Tony and Steve—and Thor, probably—are the only people in the whole world strong enough to deal with the Hulk.

He wonders if he even had a choice about moving in. Bruce can see why he might go along with it. He’d want someone to stop him, if he was really out of control.

He’d want to stop himself.

Steve slides into the seat next to Bruce. He’s so tall that he doesn’t have to use the rungs to climb up onto the barstool, he can just angle his hip and sit down, like it’s a normal chair. 

The thing is, even when Steve and Thor had walked in on him in the lab, and Bruce had thought they were military experiments, he hadn’t been as afraid of them as he should have been—at least, not once he recognized Steve. He was a kid, and everyone knew Captain America wouldn’t hurt a kid.

He’s not going to be twelve for much longer, though, is he? Tony will fix it, and either Bruce will go home and grow up to be a monster, or he’ll—go back to normal.

Be a monster again.

“You don’t look so good.” Steve is leaning forward a little, and Bruce still isn’t looking at him, but he can tell, from his voice and the way his shoulders are angled, that Steve is about to touch him. “Are you feeling okay?”

He doesn’t feel okay. In fact, he’s going to— 

“Wait—Bruce!”

There’s a bathroom around the corner from the common room kitchen. Bruce doesn’t make it all the way there before he doubles over and vomits.


	7. Chapter 7

When Bruce was eleven, near the end of the school year, he got to go on an overnight field trip with the science club to visit museums in Cleveland. It lasted the whole weekend, from early Friday to late Sunday afternoon. He thought it would be kind of boring, but he’d actually enjoyed himself a lot. They stayed in a hotel, and he’d had to share a bed with Ronnie Tippett, but Bruce had just waited until everyone was asleep and slipped out of bed to sleep on the floor. 

The best part was the planetarium show. He’d always wanted to visit Morehead Planetarium in North Carolina, where the original moon mission astronauts had studied celestial navigation, but the one in Cleveland wasn’t bad, and afterwards they’d had lunch in a restaurant then gone to see the dinosaur fossils in the natural history museum. Everyone was really into it, so Bruce didn’t stand out or get picked on for being interested in the exhibits, and no one expected him to talk about anything except the things they’d seen on the trip. He’d even got a book with photographs from the exhibit from the museum gift shop afterwards with the money his mom had sneaked him before he got on the bus.

It was the longest Bruce had ever been away from home. There haven’t been any trips since—he isn’t in science club anymore, and he doesn’t exactly get invited to slumber parties, which is fine, since slumber parties are stupid, probably, and wouldn’t involve star fields or dinosaur fossils.

The trip was maybe the coolest thing Bruce has ever gotten to do, but after the first day, he’d started thinking about home, and how the trip was going to end really soon, and how he hadn’t wanted it to end. He’d barely slept the second night, and all during the bus ride back he’d felt this deep sense of dread—like he’d woken up from a bad dream for a few seconds and couldn’t stop himself falling right back to sleep, even though he knew the dream would just start again.

That trip had been the longest Bruce had ever been away from home, until he came _here_. 

After he threw up all over the door to the bathroom, Steve carried him into the living room. He’d hovered over Bruce while he heaved, which must have been disgusting for him, even if it was mostly water that came up, but Steve put a hand on his back, holding him steady. When Bruce stood up again, he was sort of lightheaded, and when he stumbled, Steve just scooped him up and carried him a few steps over to the couch. Bruce thinks Steve must have been panicking or something, because he’s way too old to get carried around like that, and Steve had never treated him like he was weak before.

He’d set Bruce down on the couch and dropped a blanket over him—Bruce was shivering at that point, even though he didn’t really feel cold—and then Steve brought him a glass of water and made him take a few sips.

It should have been humiliating, but Bruce didn’t care as much as he normally would. Somehow, he’s fine lying here with his eyes shut and the blanket halfway up over his head, because he’s not sick, but he feels like he is. He feels like everything inside him is twisting and burning, like there’s something heavy bunched up against his lungs, making it hard to take deep breaths.

He doesn’t want to talk at all and Steve doesn’t make him, so Bruce decides that he can just pretend to be sick for a little while, if it means he gets to lie down and be quiet.

Behind him, he can hear Steve in the kitchen, talking to JARVIS, then to Tony over the intercom, or whatever you call intercoms in 2014. Their voices are quiet and worried, apart from JARVIS, who just sounds normal. Bruce can’t make out everything they’re saying, but he hears Tony say something about Jane Foster sending him her notes. 

That’s what Tony has been waiting on. Foster’s notes were all he needed to figure out how to send Bruce home again. Bruce guesses that means he won’t be here much longer.

Bruce wonders if Tony will come up and talk to him before he sends him back, or if he’s just going to wake up back in Dad’s lab without warning, like he’d woken up here in the Tower. He wonders if Steve would bring him the clothes he was wearing when he arrived, if he asked. Mom will definitely notice if he shows up back home dressed in the clothes Tony or whoever had bought for him, and Bruce has no idea how he would explain that.

At some point, he dozes off; the next thing he knows, someone is tugging his glasses off. He stirs, but a heavy hand on his shoulder makes him be still again. The next time he opens his eyes, the light coming through the glass looks different, and Steve is sitting in the chair next to the sofa, looking down at a tablet.

Bruce sits up. Steve looks up and leans over to pick up the water glass, holding it out to Bruce like he wants him to take it. Bruce drinks the whole thing.

“How do you feel?” says Steve, when he’s done.

“Fine,” says Bruce automatically.

Steve nods and leans back in his chair. “JARVIS says you don’t have a fever, at least.”

“No.” Steve looks at him. “I mean, I don’t feel like I have one. I’m fine, I’m not sick.”

“Maybe the milk was bad,” Steve suggests.

Bruce nods, because that’s a good reason for throwing up. Anyone could drink bad milk.

“Tony was worried, but I promised I’d hang out with you. He’d be here himself, but—”

“He’s working on Dr. Foster’s notes. I heard.”

Steve nods, then he looks at Bruce for a long moment, and while he’s never seen Steve look at him that way before, he recognizes the thoughtful expression. Bruce wonders if he could get away with pulling the blanket back over his head.

“I heard that Clint told you about the Avengers,” he says. “About the Hulk.”

Bruce thinks it might look rude if he shrugs, so he just sits there.

“He tell you that Hulk goes out with us on missions?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“Natasha was the one who went and found you, talked you into joining up with us. You were all the way out in India. Did anyone tell you that?”

There had been a note in his file about India, but Bruce had only skimmed it. “Not really.”

“Before you came to live here, you spent a lot of time traveling to different places. I don’t know all the details, but I know you gave medical treatment to a lot of people who couldn’t afford it otherwise. Vaccines and antibiotics and things. You always remind us that you’re not a real medical doctor, but I guess you’re smart enough that you could just pick up whatever you needed to know to help folks out.”

Steve has this look on his face like he thinks he’s telling Bruce something really important, something Bruce needs to hear. 

“After the Hulk, I think, you couldn’t really do the sort of work you used to. You didn’t like to stay in one place for too long. So you just did whatever you could to help people out. I never really told you how much I admired you for that.”

Bruce’s eyes drop to the tablet in Steve’s hands. He can’t tell, but he thinks it’s the one he was looking at earlier; he’d dropped it when he ran for the bathroom. 

If Steve picked it up and saw what Bruce was reading, that would probably explain why Steve is talking to him about the Hulk now. Like he’s letting Bruce know that he knows Bruce went behind their backs.

He doesn’t look angry about it, but his gaze is kind of intense anyway.

“There’s something else I never told you—when you’re older, I mean.” He clears his throat. “Actually, I’ve never talked to anyone about it. I wasn’t sure it would help, or if I’m even right. But I think…” He hesitates, looks down at his hands. “When I crashed my plane, I got buried deep in the ice. I mean, it sank really far down, and then seventy years went by. I know people started looking for me right away—Tony’s dad did, at least—but I was so far down that there was no real chance anyone was going to find me. Except, a few years ago, there was a massive avalanche near the crash site, apparently, and it broke up the ice field for miles around. The avalanche dislodged the bomber, brought me close enough to the surface that they were able to find me and dig me out.”

Bruce can’t help watching Steve’s face as he talks. It seems like this is really personal—like he doesn’t really like thinking about having been trapped down there. Bruce doesn’t blame him; it makes him feel a little cold and claustrophobic, when he imagines it.

He wonders what it means that Steve is talking to him about this when he says he’s never talked about it to anyone before.

“Before you started doctoring people,” Steve continues, “you mostly stuck to isolated places, with small, scattered populations. Right after the accident, you didn’t—I mean, you’re really good at controlling your transformations now, but I guess at first it was a little harder, so you were trying to keep out of people’s way, just in case. Sometimes you changed, but no one was around to get in the way. That’s—that’s always been really important to you.” He clears his throat. “According to the reports from the recovery team, a little while before I woke up—right around the time of that big avalanche—there were were reports from near the crash site of…well, people didn’t really know what they were seeing. But the analysts who wrote the report figure that they were, you know, early sitings of the big guy. He’s really strong. Strong enough to crack open some ice, that’s for sure.”

Steve is still looking at Bruce really intently. It’s like he’s expects Bruce to just read between the lines or something, but Bruce—all he can think about is that, if he was really that good at staying out of people’s way, if he really _cared_ so much about hurting people, then there wouldn’t be a whole huge file to read about just, exactly, how many people he’s hurt. 

“I guess I’m just saying…” Steve shrugs. “I grew up believing that things happened for a reason. It’s one of the ways I’m still pretty old fashioned, I guess. Tony would get really angry if he heard me talking like this, and I understand that; there’s so much suffering in the world, and people die and get hurt for no purpose every day. But I look around at my friends—people _like_ Tony—and I see how much good they do, stuff that wouldn’t have been possible without all the bad things that happened to them, and it really makes me believe…that it can be worth it, I guess. That no matter how many bad things happen to you, you can still do good. The choices you make are more important than…than accidents that are out of your control.”

Bruce wonders what, exactly, happened to Tony to make Steve talk about him like that; or maybe he’s really talking about himself, about waking up in the 21st century all alone and deciding to fight aliens and bad guys anyway. 

No, he’s not stupid. He knows Steve is talking about _him_. He’s trying to say that it isn’t Bruce’s fault that he’s the Hulk, like he wants Bruce to believe that the fact that he used to pretend to be a doctor makes up for all the rest of it, but that’s just…

Steve is a really nice person; he’s a _good_ person, so he’s trying to be positive, but to Bruce, it just feels like all the times his mom has told him that _your father is very proud of you, he just doesn’t know how to say it_. Like it’s something she says because she wants it to be true, or maybe just because she doesn’t see what Dad’s like when he and Bruce are alone together. Steve doesn’t really know Bruce that well, so he’s trying to be encouraging, because Bruce is a kid, but all Bruce can think of is that moment in the lab when he told Steve that he was strong but not smart. 

Bruce’s mom is a good person, but his dad is the smart one. Even when he wants to believe what his mother tells him, he knows deep down that his father is more likely to be right.

Steve looks like he’s waiting for Bruce to say something, but Bruce doesn’t want to tell him that he’s stupid, so he just looks down at his hands. After a minute, Steve sighs and stands up.

“It’s been a couple of hours, so I’m going to go check in with Tony,” he says. “Can you hang out here for a couple of minutes? Clint or Nat should be here soon.”

Bruce nods.

As Steve walks past the sofa, his hand comes down on Bruce’s shoulder, gripping him tight for a second. It kind of hurts, but Bruce knows he doesn’t mean it to hurt, so he doesn’t mind.

When he’s alone, Bruce picks up the tablet Steve left behind on the chair. The screen is back to the main menu, rows of icons that he’s never had a chance to open. 

The thing is, he understands what Steve means about making choices. Bruce does that all the time: he decides whether to come straight home after school and help Mom with the laundry and the dishes so the house will be clean when Dad gets back from work, or whether go to the library so that, when he gets home, Dad will get distracted from whatever he’s yelling at Mom about, because Bruce is late.

Bruce understands about making the best of a bad situation. But this is different. If there’s something destructive inside you that you can’t control, then you don’t get a choice. You can limit the damage, maybe, but that’s not the same thing.

Even at home, Bruce doesn’t feel trapped the way does right now, thinking about what he’s going to become. He used to feel trapped all the time, when he was younger, but that was before the Cleveland trip.

A couple of days after he came home from Cleveland, he’d been standing in the kitchen, washing dishes while Mom ran to the grocery store. He’d shoved his hand down into the bottom of a glass, trying to get the ring of dried milk; Mom always said to run some water into it and let it loosen up, but he didn’t have time for that, he had to finish the dishes so he could start his homework. So he’d shoved his hand down inside, and the glass had shattered, just like she always warned him, and he’d got a deep cut across the back of his right forefinger. 

Bruce had stood there for a long time, kind of shocked, not knowing what to do with the broken glass in his hands. He’d watched the blood run between his fingers, dripping into the dishwater, where the drops bloomed and dilated. He’d always been fascinated by the way blood droplets looked almost perfectly round when they struck a flat surface, assuming they fell at 90 degrees, but he’d never seen blood in water before.

Then Bruce had looked at the sharp glass, and he’d thought about the fact that people killed themselves by slitting their wrists. He didn’t think about doing it himself, he just thought about it being something people did, and how, actually, the cut on his finger didn’t really hurt at all, even though it was deep and bleeding a lot.

That night, he was lying in bed, and the thought came to him, just out of nowhere, that he could die. That it was a possibility. Theoretically, of course, people died all the time; they got sick or got into car accidents or went to war or got old. But he was a kid, so death had always been this mysterious, unattainable thing to him. But he wasn’t a child anymore; he was old enough, now, that he could figure out how to do most things, how to weigh the consequences and make a decision.

Something had opened up inside him—he’d felt this incredible warm rush of relief, and it reminded him of how he’d felt sitting in the Cleveland planetarium, looking up at the star field projection—he’d realized how completely, totally _vast_ the universe was, and how he was just this incredibly small part of it—everything and everyone in his life was so tiny compared to the immense nothingness that surrounded them, and he felt a kind of freedom he’d never felt before. Like he was only connected to things around him by this thin tether that could snap at any second, or he could cut himself free, if he wanted to. If he chose to.

For as long as he could remember he’d felt trapped, but he wasn’t, actually. There was this huge, incredible void all around him, and it wouldn’t be hard, not the least bit hard, to just let himself go and become part of it.

Lying there in his bed, thinking about all that nothingness, he had started crying. It was the only time in his life he’d ever cried because he was _happy_.

Any time he thinks about death as a choice, he ends up thinking about his mother. How upset she would be, and how she would be all alone, just her and Dad in the house together. Dad, Bruce thinks, probably wouldn’t care, but he’d be angry, like Bruce had embarrassed him or something, and Bruce wouldn’t be there to distract him. So he’d promised himself that if—he didn’t want anything to happen to Mom, not at all, but people got sick, sometimes, and—just, if there was ever a time when she wasn’t there anymore, then Bruce could think about dying in a serious way. 

It’s 2014 now, and his parents are both dead. Bruce is alone in the future, and when he grows up, he’s going to hurt people. He’s not going to have any choice about that in the future, but right now, he’s still 12. He doesn’t turn into that thing yet; he’s not strong. He’s not invulnerable, and he still—

Maybe he still has a chance to stop himself. 

Bruce doesn’t know why he’s here, but Steve had said that things happened for a reason. Bruce doesn’t believe that any more than he believes in God, but the other thing Steve had said, about how accidents happen, but choices are more important—he gets that. He understands.

Maybe that’s what Steve had been trying to tell him all along. And Tony hadn’t come to see him, so maybe he’d wanted to give Steve a chance to tell him about that. About choosing.

That’s good, then. They probably won’t try to get in Bruce’s way. This will probably be really easy, actually.

 

*

The pain inside Tony’s skull is thick, greasy, clinging. He never should have cut back on the drinking; that’s how you get hangovers, and he doesn’t really _do_ hangovers anymore.

An entire pot of coffee and a shower (three minutes on hot, one minute on ice cold, Tony isn’t too proud to admit that he screamed) left him feeling sufficiently scoured to start working with JARVIS’s projection of Foster’s notes. It’s two hours in, however, and he’s getting nowhere.

The notes are a mess, they’re—like, half of them are voice-to-text or script-to-text transcriptions, and no one’s edited them, so they’re barely English, even accounting for the dialectical drift between physics and engineering. Not to mention, they aren’t even a little bit organized. Foster’s sick, so Tony shouldn’t judge, except he gets the feeling that she always works like that. He’d have hoped that Bruce’s share of the project would be an oasis in the chaos, but while Bruce is methodical, he’s not exactly tidy, and he’s the last person who’s going to clean up after her.

Tony is standing in the midst of a dozen projections, just trying to find, maybe, a starting point in all the madness, when JARVIS says, “Sir, Dr. Banner is in the workshop.”

“Is he looking for me? I thought he was sick?” He tries to ignore the low pulse of guilt in his chest. When Steve told him that Bruce was vomiting all over the kitchen, part of him had wanted to go straight there. But they’d left things pretty unresolved last night, and despite the drunken heart-to-heart Tony had with Steve afterwards, he still doesn’t know what the hell to say to the kid.

There’s not going to be a clean-cut either/or choice ahead of them; anything they do is going to be a gamble based on probabilities. He’d just wanted a chance to calculate some odds before the next time they talked, but he knows that’s his issue, not Bruce’s.

“Dr. Banner’s symptoms have discontinued and he has been resting for most of the morning,” JARVIS tells him. “I admitted him to the workshop because you gave him clearance to visit the fabrication units. However, I believe he is in some distress and would benefit from adult supervision.”

“Wait, what?” Tony pushes back from the table. “Where the fuck is Steve?”

“Captain Rogers is en route to your present location. Agent Romanov is expected to arrive at the Tower shortly. Captain Rogers requested that I observe Dr. Banner in the interim.”

“What’s Bruce doing?”

JARVIS paused. “He appears to be looking out of the windows.”

Tony leaves the projections without a second thought and heads for the elevator at a fast clip. Steve can come find them if it’s important.

When Tony gets to the workshop, he finds Bruce standing near a workbench scattered with tools: a blowtorch, wrenches, awls, all the normal chaos that surrounds Tony the middle of a build. Bruce’s back is to the door, even though he must have heard Tony come in. That’s strange, Tony thinks; even as an adult, Bruce doesn’t normally let people walk up behind him.

“Hey, Bruce,” he says easily, pausing next to Dummy, who lifts his head/arm with an excited chirrup of greeting. “You ready for that tour? Glad you’re feeling better. Or I assume you must be, since you’re here. If you’re not, no judgment, just, try not to puke on any sensitive equipment. I’ve done that, it’s a bitch to clean.”

Slowly, Bruce turns to face him. He’s pale, but steady on his feet, and he looks—Tony’s not sure what to call that look. Since he turned 12, Bruce has been either closed-off and suspicious or enthusiastic and eager to please, but this is different. He’s detached, calm in the wrong way, like he’s hiding something. 

“You are feeling okay now, right?” says Tony uneasily.

“Yes, thank you, I’m fine,” says Bruce.

Steve had called Bruce polite before, but he’s never put up a shield of good manners around Tony like that before. 

“So…” Tony strolls forward, not missing the fact that Bruce moves when he moves. It’s subtle, but there’s footwork involved—like Bruce is paying very close attention to how close he gets. It bugs him, because he’d thought that, even if Bruce didn’t precisely trust him yet, at least they’d come far enough that Bruce wasn’t worried anymore about Tony hurting him.

On the other hand, he doesn’t seem frightened so much as wary. Like their tandem movement is the circling of opponents before a fight. Tony doesn’t like that thought either.

“You met Dummy?” Not taking his eyes off Bruce, Tony jerks his head back in the robot’s direction. “Butterfingers and You are at their charging stations, but they can come say hi if you want.”

“They’re your robots?” says Bruce.

“Yup. Borderline useless, but charming. Not unlike their creator.”

Bruce blinks like he didn’t even hear the joke. “Are they like JARVIS?”

Tony shrugs. “Yes and no. They’re like, JARVIS’s slow second cousins.” He thrusts his hands into his pockets. “You want to see something better, I can show you the suits. Gallery’s that way.”

Bruce looks toward the gallery, and his gaze lingers, as if he’s spotted something more interesting just beyond. “Yeah, that would be cool.” He doesn’t move. “I know you’re working on Dr. Foster’s notes. I can look around on my own, if you’re busy.”

Yeah, there is something deeply weird going on here. Bruce isn’t the type of kid to coolly suggest that Tony fuck off and let him poke around a strange part of the Tower unsupervised. Is he pissed with Tony about last night? Honest to God, Tony hadn’t been trying to pressure him into talking, but Bruce _had_ talked, so maybe he’s feeling weird about that. Tony can’t blame him if that’s the case; he gets the feeling that he’s the first person Bruce has ever opened up to about that aspect of his life. As a child, at least. He doesn’t know who Bruce might have talked to as an adult.

He hadn’t gone into a lot of detail. He’d said things like, _Dad has a bad temper_ , and _he drinks sometimes_ , and _he doesn’t like me that much_ , but the tension in his voice had filled in the blanks pretty clearly. Tony had fought to keep his cool; he’d kept his clenched fists hidden in pockets, kept his voice even and his questions undemanding. He hadn’t let on how much he felt like destroying things, how vividly he was fantasizing about tripping the light fantastic right back to 1982 and lighting up Brian Banner’s life with some timeline-busting repulsor technology. 

He’d restrained himself, because he didn’t think Bruce would find his anger comforting—the opposite, more likely—but now that Bruce is being cool right back at him, Tony’s wondering if that was the wrong move. 

Maybe Bruce needed to see someone get angry on his behalf for once. Maybe he’d mistaken Tony’s forced calm for indifference.

Tony opens his mouth to say that he doesn’t usually let anyone up here without him, no offense, but hey, would Bruce want to see the armor in action, maybe buzz the Chrysler Building, when JARVIS announces Steve’s arrival. 

Tony looks over his shoulder and sees Steve hovering inside the door of the workshop. Steve smiles, nods at Bruce, but he doesn’t come any closer. Whatever he has to say to Tony, he doesn’t want Bruce to hear it. 

“Lemme see what he wants,” Tony tells Bruce. “Go ahead and poke around.”

Bruce walks off, without hesitation. Tony watches him for a second, then looks back at Steve. He can’t tell if Cap is worried, or if that’s just his face. 

“I thought I told you to stay with Bruce,” he says.

“I thought he would stay put,” says Steve, looking sheepish. “He’s never wandered off before.”

“Yeah, well, something’s eating at him. Any idea what?”

“Um. Yeah, I think maybe I do.” Steve takes a deep breath. “After he got sick this morning, I took a look at his tablet. Looks like he was reading his SHIELD file.”

Tony goes hot, then cold. He bites down on a curse and drags a hand over his face.

“It looked like he’d read pretty much to the end,” Steve says. “I tried to talk to him about it, but I’m not sure I got through. He was really upset. He tried not to show it, but…”

Tony sighs deeply and presses the balls of his hands against his eyes. “Yeah, he’s wrecked. I knew it, I just didn’t know why.” 

He doesn’t need to look at the file for a refresher. He’d just read it about twelve hours ago, which is the only reason it was on his servers for Bruce to find in the first place. Tony had meant to trash it as soon as he was done, but he’d been too busy location-targeting the nearest liquor stash. 

The file hadn’t even been about him, and after reading it he’d still felt the need to get the drunkest he’s been since he thought he was dying. No wonder Bruce hurled.

“I feel bad,” says Steve. “Someone should have talked to him before he found out like that. He should have heard it from people who care about him, not…”

“Yeah, we gotta fix that,” Tony says, distracted. “I don’t know—you got ideas? Like, how the fuck do you fix a thing like that? I don’t, Jesus.”

“Tony, I know. We’ll just—“ Steve frowns. “Where did Bruce go?”

“He asked to look at the suits. Never mind, I’ll go. I’ll talk to him. Just…hang on.” Tony walks off, leaving Steve in the doorway, covering the open floor at a quick clip. “Bruce?” he calls. “Hey, buddy, come on out for a second.”

The gallery is empty. The workshop behind him is empty, apart from Steve, and there’s only one other point of exit up here, but it’s not one anyone would use unless they were flight capable.

Through the glass walls that open onto a view onto the flight deck, Tony sees Bruce walking down the runway. He’s already so far away as to look smaller for the distance.

He could just be checking out the view, but it’s not exactly safe out there. For one thing, there isn’t much of a railing.

Tony doesn’t realize that he’s frozen in place until the adrenaline comes crashing over him, and he starts running.


	8. Chapter 8

Bruce is really cold. It’s still morning, and the sun is shining, but he’d forgotten about it being winter now. This high up, with winds this strong, he figures it would be cold no matter the time of year. The crosswind cuts through the thin material of his shirt like a whip. 

He folds his arms over his chest and dips his chin down into his collar. It makes it easier to hold still and take in the immensity of the space before him.

When he’d looked out over the penthouse balcony a couple of days ago, he’d recognized New York instantly; that had gone a long way towards convincing him that Steve and Tony might be telling the truth about what had happened to him. The city skyline had seemed like this fixed point in history, but now that he’s taking a second look, he realizes how much it’s changed from the images he’s seen before. The Twin Towers are gone, for one thing. It feels weird to miss them when he never actually saw them in real life.

Tony hadn’t mentioned that he had an actual landing strip on top of the Tower, but Bruce guesses the Avengers probably fly helicopters or something on their missions. It has to be helicopters, since the runway isn’t long enough for a plane. The strip is just like a bridge that juts out into the open air. Standing here, Bruce feels exposed, like his footing is uneven, or the ledge is going to crumble under his feet.

He didn’t actually think he’d be scared, but he is a little. Mostly he’s afraid he’s going to chicken out. He pictured it happening much faster than this. In his head, he hadn’t hesitated. He’d been brisk, purposeful; his mind had been made up. 

In his head, though, he’d been alone, with no one to interfere. But he knows JARVIS wouldn’t have let him up here unless Tony was around, so it has to be like this. He has to be quick, before Tony comes out to check on him. Tony must understand, on some level, that this is how it has to be, but he’s a good person. If he has to watch it happen, he’ll probably feel guilty, and Bruce doesn’t want that.

No one has ever been as kind to him as Tony has, or Steve. Even Clint and Natasha have been really friendly. He knows, now, that it wasn’t real, but he’s still grateful. They hadn’t had to pretend, just for his sake. There had been moments—hours, even—when Bruce had been hanging out with them, and he’d been able to believe that it was normal. That _he_ was just an ordinary kid, with friends. 

It almost made coming here worthwhile.

He’s wasting time. Tony doesn’t like him being alone, so he’ll come looking in a second. Bruce needs to be quick. He—he probably shouldn’t look down. It isn’t going to hurt, there won’t be time for that, but if he shuts his eyes he can pretend it’s not even happening.

Bruce takes a few steps towards to the low railing and shuts his eyes. He thinks about gravity for a moment; it’s weird, because one of the first things you learn in physics is that all objects fall at the same rate, but it doesn’t seem like it ought to be true, even though he knows it is. There are a lot of true things that don’t make sense, he guesses.

The wind is really strong up here. If Bruce leans forward a little, maybe a gust will just carry him over the side. Would it be scarier that way, not being in control, or would it be easier? If he just—

There’s a shout from behind him. It sounds like his name.

There are footsteps pounding along the tarmac, heavy and rapid enough to be heard even over the roaring of the wind. It’s got to be Tony, which means Bruce has completely fucked up.

If he does it now, if he just—Tony sounds furious, and if Bruce has to look at him, he’s not going to be able to—

He doesn’t mean to turn around; it’s reflex, because someone is running up behind him. Backing up a few steps is reflex too. Tony is running so fast that if he crashes into Bruce, they’re both going to go over the side, so Bruce backs up some more, and that’s when Tony skids to a stop. He’s panting, and his face is grey; he looks like he’s having a heart attack.

Tony holds his hands up, like he’s surrendering, or reaching for Bruce, but he’s too far away.

“Don’t move,” Tony gasps. “Bruce, just—stay there. Just, wait a minute. Don’t move. I’m begging you, please.”

Tony’s voice is ragged, and the way his face looks makes Bruce feel scared for him. Guilt pulses in his gut. He never wanted to make Tony look like that; this was supposed to fix things, not hurt anybody. 

He’s screwed up so bad. He should have taken the chance when he had it and not been such a little _coward_. 

“Okay, good. Good. Just, keep standing there, you’re doing great. Shit.” Tony grabs at his chest like it hurts. “Bruce, talk to me. Whatever you’re thinking, we can fix it, I swear. That’s what I do, that’s what I’m best at, you just gotta give me a chance.”

Bruce stands still, because he doesn’t want Tony to be upset. If he talks to Tony, maybe he can make him understand. Bruce wants to try, at least. He owes Tony that much. 

But the longer Bruce stands there, watching Tony try to catch his breath, the less he knows what to say. It all made perfect sense a few minutes ago, but now he doesn’t have the words. He doesn’t even know where to start.

“Bruce.” Tony staggers forward, like he’s about to fall over, and it makes Bruce want to reach out to him. Then Tony takes a few more steps, and he’s getting really close now, almost in arm’s reach, and Bruce backs up without even meaning to. 

Tony freezes. 

“ _Don’t,_ ” he pleads. “Bruce, I am _begging_ you, here.”

Bruce stops.

“Okay. Okay, listen. Listen.” Tony drags his hands over his face. “Shit, okay. Bruce, is it—why are we up here? I promise, I won’t get any closer, but you have to tell me. Fair’s fair.”

Bruce wants to tell him. He had so many reasons for not saying anything, before, but if he’s going to do this, none of those reasons matter anymore, so he should just say it. That’s what Tony wants, and Bruce wants to give him what he wants.

There’s a knot forming in his throat, and the wind is stinging his eyes, and Bruce knows that as soon as he opens his mouth he’s just going to choke on it.

“You _know_ why,” he manages, finally, before he has to stop, because he doesn’t think he can breathe and talk at the same time.

Tony’s mouth twists. He shut his eyes for a second, and when they open again, they’re dark and fierce, almost—angry, Bruce thinks.

“The file?” he says. 

Bruce swallows.

“That file you read, about the Hulk. Is that it?”

The way Tony says it, short and clipped, like the whole idea is stupid, makes Bruce not want to admit it.

“Let me tell you something about that file,” Tony says, and he takes a step forward, but Bruce doesn’t move, because he doesn’t think Tony realizes he even did it. 

“The people who wrote it? They _don’t know you_. They never fought next to you, they’ve never seen the way you—Bruce, you’ve saved my life. So many times, I could stand here all day telling you stories—not to mention, you _saved the world_.”

Steve had said something like that. Steve had talked about Bruce helping people, but he hadn’t—he guesses that Tony is talking about the aliens, but that wasn’t just Bruce, it was all of them, and it still doesn’t—

“I’m not gonna lie to you,” Tony continues. “You’ve hurt people. Never once on purpose in your whole life, but it’s happened. Guess what though, Bruce? _I have too._ In fact, if anyone’s guilty of—look, you don’t always get a choice about what happens when you suit up for a fight, but I do. I choose to put on the armor. I do it to help people, but there are always consequences. I fight anyway, because—because I believe I can _help_. Even though the price of helping is knowing that sometimes innocent people get hurt because of me.”

Bruce has sort of forgotten how to breathe. Tony just keeps staring at him with that intense light in his dark eyes, and there’s something fragile about it—like he thinks maybe Bruce is going to tell him he’s wrong. Like he’s afraid of that. 

“What happened to you was—you don’t always get to be in control, but me? I control everything I do.” Tony’s lips are a white line against his dark beard. “So what does that make me, Bruce? Should I jump too?”

“ _No!_ ” The shock makes Bruce talk without thinking. “That’s not the same thing. I’m not _like_ you.”

“Tell me why.”

Bruce doesn’t want to be up here anymore. 

Nothing’s changed, but he can’t just—not with Tony standing right there watching him, he _can’t_. But he can’t just walk away either, because what happens then? What is Tony going to do with him? Lock him up, probably, or—he doesn’t even know. Nothing’s changed, and no matter what Tony says, he can’t just forget—

He came up here to do the right thing, but it’s not just about that. If his life was different, if it was just him and Mom, and they were happy and normal, then maybe he could believe what Tony’s saying, what Steve tried to tell him. 

The problem is, even if they’re right, Bruce doesn’t care. He doesn’t care because he’s not a good person. He’s selfish, and he doesn’t want to be afraid anymore; he always thought he’d grow up and things would be different, but it’s _not_ different, so what’s the point of _anything_? 

He needs to do this—it’s so much easier this way, or it would be if Tony would just—

He wouldn’t even care about all the people he’s going to hurt if he could just believe that—

“You’re my friend, Bruce,” Tony says, his voice quiet and strained. “I _need_ you here.”

“You don’t know me!” Bruce knows that he’s crying and he hates it; he hates how he sounds, how he feels. “Stop pretending, just _stop_ —”

There’s a quiet noise behind him; it isn’t the wind, and the skin starts to prickle at the back of his neck a split second before strong arms lock around his waist.

He starts to kick, but then his feet are off the ground. He thrusts his elbows out, but it’s useless, he’s already being carried across the tarmac at a dead run. It’s fast, faster than he’s ever moved in his life, except it’s not him, and he’s shouting or screaming but the wind just carries it away where no one can hear.

A second later, he’s inside Tony’s workshop. Someone says something to him in a low voice, right next to his ear. Then he’s being lowered to the ground, and he’s not ready; his knees buckle, but instead of collapsing he starts crawling backwards, away away _away_ , until his back hits a wall and he can’t get any further.

He sits there for a long moment, and when the haze finally clears, Bruce finds himself looking at the worst thing he’s ever seen in his life: Captain America, crouching on the ground across from him, his face so disappointed and sad that all Bruce can do is clench his fists while his insides writhe with disgust.

 

*

This is how it happens for Tony:

He spends a literal _lifetime_ watching Bruce inch towards the edge of the roof, until Steve Rogers scales the side of the fucking building and whisks him inside to safety. Then the relief hits him, and his knees give out, and he spends the next twenty minutes having a quiet panic attack.

When he’s done, there’s a haze of calm hanging over him that he clings to. The alternative, fully facing the reality of the situation, will only lead to gibbering hysteria, and he doesn’t have time for that.

He picks himself up and walks inside, pausing to lean against the back of the crash sofa behind his workbench. He can see Bruce and Steve together on the far side of the room. Bruce has jammed himself into a corner; his head is resting on his knees, and his arms are folded around his head. Steve is kneeling nearby, talking to him in low, quiet tones that don’t carry.

Tony doesn’t really know what to do next. He has no contingency plan for this. He’s not really a planner anyway; historically, he goes with his gut. Right now though, his gut is silent. His gut, emphatically, wants nothing to do with this.

As he looks at Bruce huddled up in the corner, Tony has a thought that he doesn’t like one bit: this boy is a stranger. He’s not _Bruce_ ; he’s the part of Bruce that the older version has always kept hidden. Wasn’t that what he’d just said out there, shouting to be heard over the wind— _you don’t know me_. He was right. 

This boy is not his friend. He’s not the man who shares his lab and effortlessly masters engineering principles that are completely outside his discipline just so he can help Tony test suit upgrades. He’s not the most self-sufficient person Tony has ever met. He is a stranger, and all this time Tony has been treating him like an obstacle in the way of getting his friend back.

That’s why Tony has spent the last two days trying to fix him instead of doing what he likes to think he would do for literally any other person in the world who needed him this much, which is fix things _for_ him.

Natasha had warned him about this; _he’ll see right through you_ , she’d said.

The only thing Tony has ever done for this boy is try to promise him a future that already belongs to someone else, and why? What was the point? What twelve year old even gets that the future is a real thing, let alone a kid whose normal day to day life is—

What really scares the shit out of Tony about Bruce trying to jump off a building is that he wasn’t being irrational He was just doing what any prisoner would do: looking to escape any way he could.

Tony gets that. He knows what that feels like, and he knows there’s only one thing you can do for a person in that situation. 

You have to show them there’s a different way out.

Tony straightens up, feeling an ache in his muscles so deep you’d think _he_ was the one who just scaled up the side of a building. Slowly, he walks across the workshop, giving Dummy’s chassis an idle pat as he passes. 

Steve lifts his head, relief smoothing some of the faint lines from his forehead. Tony gives him a nod, then looks down at the boy next to him. All that is visible of Bruce is a compressed bundle of skinny limbs and a wind-tangled mop of dark hair.

Tony drops to the floor in front of him, close enough that their knees would be touching if Bruce’s weren’t folded up against his chest. He lets the quiet settle over them for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I screwed up.”

It takes everything Tony has, every ounce of restraint, to just sit there and keep his mouth shut until Bruce lifts his head from his knees.

He’s been crying. His face is pale and splotchy, and his eyes are narrowed—not with suspicion, but like he’s been hiding in the dark and the light hurts.

Tony waits and watches, and eventually Bruce yanks his glasses off. He scrubs snot and tears away with his sleeve, then cleans his glasses on the hem of his shirt. 

It’s a long time before he jams his glasses back onto his face, the gesture startlingly ferocious.

“I mean it,” Tony says, now that he’s sure Bruce is listening. “I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t do anything,” Bruce retorts, his voice hoarse and hollow. “ _I’m_ the one who—” 

He shuts his mouth.

Tony presses his hands flat against his legs. There is a need, here, to be careful about what he says, but he can’t be too careful either. Can’t overthink it. Overthinking got him into this mess. He can’t afford to mess up again.

Bruce isn’t meeting his eyes, but at least he’s not hiding anymore.

“I shouldn’t have asked you to trust me,” Tony says, and he feels, rather than see Steve’s head jerk in his direction. “I think I—sort of jumped the gun there. I mean, why the fuck should you trust anybody? What would that even look like?” 

He feels better for getting that out. It’s easier to go on now that he’s started.

“In your shoes, I think I’d pretty much—I mean, as far as I can see, literally every person you’ve ever met has just made your life harder. Is that what it feels like? Because it really seems like—everyone you should be able to depend on is either hurting you, or standing aside and letting you get hurt. That’s not really conducive to—people need to earn that from you, is what I’m saying. People need to _show you_ how trust works, not…” 

Tony darts a glance at Steve, looking for a sign that he’ll bail Tony out if he goes wrong. But Steve looks about as helpless as Tony has ever seen him, and he meets Tony’s gaze with a tiny shrug.

Tony rubs his eyes.

“I get that you think this is your fault. It isn’t, but I know you think that, because you’re the kind of person where, you have a problem, it’s up to you to fix it. Who else is going to, right? Like, it doesn’t even occur to you that that shouldn’t be your job.”

Bruce jerks his chin, looking irritable.

“The thing is…” Tony shrugs. “I kind of think it was supposed to be my job. And I kind of…failed. Like, spectacularly. You never should have—I’m not blaming you, I’m saying, this?” Tony gestures vaguely, trying to encompass the roof and the near-disaster that had taken place there. “No one gets to that point unless they think they’re out of options. You never should have felt like—I let it get to that point. _I_ did. That was my fuck up.”

Bruce is still scowling at the ground, but Tony sees his lips move slightly, like he’s muttering something under his breath. “Didn’t catch that,” Tony says.

Bruce shakes his head impatiently.

“It’s okay. You can say it, whatever you—”

“It had nothing to do with you,” Bruce snaps, still not meeting his eyes. “You don’t even _know_ me. It was _my_ idea.”

“You’ve been here almost three days,” Tony tells him, feeling the roil of guilt. “I _should_ know you. Or, put it this way—you should know _me_. You should’ve—I could have made sure that you knew, without a doubt, that there is literally nothing in this world I wouldn’t do to make you feel safe.”

He doesn’t blame Bruce for not wanting to look at him. Tony doesn’t really want to be looked at. Saying this stuff out loud—in front of Steve, no less—it makes him feel about as naked as he’s ever been.

Tony’s probably making a huge mistake even trying to have this conversation right now. He probably should have gone straight for a directory of qualified child therapists and inpatient mental health programs. He just—it’s not in his nature to delegate.

And he kind of thinks that he’s in too deep now to tag someone else in without it feeling like an abandonment to Bruce. He won’t take that risk.

“So, back to the trust thing. I’m not gonna ask for again, not yet. I’m gonna ask you for something else. Maybe something a little easier.” Tony takes a deep, quiet breath. “Give me _time_.”

Steven makes a sound, like he’s started to say something then thought better of it. Tony can’t spare him any attention, though. He only has eyes for Bruce, who is starting to look confused. 

“Give me a year,” Tony says. “A year to prove that things can get better. Or a month. Give me a week, if that’s the best you can do. Because, I know you don’t get this, and that isn’t your fault, but I swear to God, Bruce, you don’t _have_ to feel like this. That, that feeling, like everything inside you is _wrong_? That can go away. It _will_ go away. The crazy thing is? It’s not even hard. All you—” 

Tony chokes, and he covers it by smiling a little, because sometimes that’s how he expresses rage. 

“All have to do is start spending time around people who don’t treat you like shit,” he says softly. “It’s honestly that simple.”

The silence that follows could be a sign that Bruce is really thinking about it. Or it might mean that Tony lost him completely. He can’t tell, and the silence is really getting to him, so he turns to Steve. 

“Cap, could you, uh…I think we could use some water.”

“Of course.” Steve is on his feet instantly, like he’s just been waiting for someone to give him a job. “Be right back.”

Bruce looks up to watch Steve go, and it occurs to Tony that maybe _he_ should have gone for the water. Maybe Bruce feels safer with Captain America in the room. But then Bruce looks right at him, and that cool, direct gaze wipes all other worries from his mind.

“Just send me back,” Bruce says. His voice is hoarse, exhausted. “I don’t belong here.”

“Say who?”

The look that Bruce gives him is _delightfully_ withering, and despite everything, Tony has to fight not to smile.

“I’m serious. Why shouldn’t you stay here? Fuck 1982. Fuck the mullets, and Reagan, the recession, all of it. Embrace the 21st century. Spend the rest of your adolescence learning terrible life lessons from superheroes.”

“That’s not funny.”

“You think I’m joking? Need me to make it real? JARVIS.”

“Sir?”

Bruce’s head whips around, like he’s looking for him.

“Delete the data packet Foster sent over this morning.” He waits. “Is it done?”

“Yes, sir.”

“There. Done. Forgotten. That’s a relief. I wasn’t getting anywhere with it anyway.”

“She can just send it again.”

“Yeah, if I ask her to, but guess what? I’m not gonna.”

Bruce takes a deep breath; for a second, Tony thinks he’s about to start yelling. “What about your _friend _?” he demands. “The one who’s _supposed_ to be here?”__

__Tony’s glad that Steve isn’t around now, actually. _Tony_ doesn’t even know how he feels about what he’s going to tell Bruce, and he’s not letting himself think about it too hard. This is an emergency; he’s performing triage. He’ll deal with the implications when they hit him like a train at five o’clock in the morning._ _

__“Here’s the thing about you,” says Tony. “You’re a genius. And when you’re an adult, you’re the most resourceful person I’ve ever met in my life.” Tony has to take a breath, because now, he knows how Bruce got that way. “He’s gonna be okay. If there’s a way for him to get back here, I know he’ll find it. In the mean time—you’re the one who needs me. And if I have to pick between my friend who can take care of himself and my friend who needs me, that—I mean, that’s not even a choice.”_ _

__“I’m not your friend,” says Bruce, without heat. It sounds less like rejection than resignation. But Tony had been expecting it, and he doesn’t miss a beat._ _

__“Well, I’m yours. Pretty much whether you like it or not.” He shrugs. “People tell me I have boundary issues.”_ _

__Bruce looks like he doesn’t even know what to think about that, which is fair enough._ _

__“Uh, that being said. You don’t _have_ to stay.”_ _

__Bruce’s head jerks up. He stares at Tony with wide eyes; is he imagining it, or is there something fearful in his gaze?_ _

__“I, uh, probably should have phrased it in the form of a question to begin with.” Tony clears his throat. “I’m not trying to keep you here against your will. I’ll keep working on a way to send you back if that’s what you want. I just…” He forces himself to keep his voice clear of all judgment. “ _Is_ that what you, because I don’t think—”_ _

__“No!”_ _

__Tony blinks. Bruce’s mouth twists; then, in a flash, he’s on his feet, and Tony doesn’t think. His fear is a living organism with its own imperatives. He scrambles off the floor and lunges—Bruce’s shoulders are thin and breakable under his hands, and it takes a few seconds before he realizes that Bruce isn’t fighting him, isn’t trying to get away._ _

__The tremors under Tony’s fingers are because Bruce is crying. He isn’t making a sound, but his body is nearly convulsing with the effort of keeping quiet, and Tony…_ _

__He has to do something. But if he asks for permission, Bruce will just think he has to say no._ _

__Tony steps up and pulls Bruce against his chest. It’s awkward; it’s been ages since Tony did this for anyone, and it’s painfully obvious that Bruce doesn’t even know _how_ to let himself be held, but Tony is stubborn. He keeps one hand firm between Bruce’s shoulder blades and the other cupped against the back of his head._ _

__When Bruce shudders and presses his face into Tony’s shoulder, it feels like a victory._ _

__“It’s okay,” Tony says, as much to himself as to Bruce. “We’ll figure this out. You’ll be okay.”_ _

__They’re still standing there when Steve gets back, holding an entire 24-case of water bottles in one hand._ _


	9. Chapter 9

Tony falls asleep halfway through _Wall-E_.

He’s sprawled out over the end of the sofa in Bruce’s room (which has a living room and a kitchen and two bedrooms and is almost the size of Bruce’s parents’ entire _house_ ) and there’s a gigantic bowl of popcorn threatening to fall out of his lap. Bruce can hear him snoring underneath the sounds of the television. It isn’t really that late yet, but Bruce has gotten the impression that Tony doesn’t sleep much at night, and besides, they’ve been watching movies for _hours_ : first it was _Brave_ , then _Lilo & Stitch_, then _Mulan_. Tony had insisted on cartoons, but he’d let Bruce pick the titles.

When he was on the roof, talking to Tony, Bruce hadn’t been able to imagine just…walking away. He’d thought everything would be different, that everyone would act differently around him.

But Tony, somehow, managed to make things seem normal. He’d ordered pizza, and then Steve and Natasha had hung out with them for the first couple of movies, and no one had been weird.

Well, maybe Tony had been feeling a little weird. He kept touching Bruce—a hand on his shoulder, an elbow poking his side. It was embarrassing at first, because Bruce had _cried_ all over him in the workshop, but he was fine now and he didn’t need…

But the way Tony touched him, it wasn’t a big deal. It was nice, actually. Bruce had felt sort of numb at first, unreal, like he was floating a little ways outside his own body. After Tony accidentally-on-purpose bumped into him a few times, the feeling had started to go away.

On the screen, a couple of robots are making high-pitched cooing noises at each other. On the couch, Tony snorts in his sleep, almost loud enough to drown them out. Bruce looks at him for a moment, then leans over and carefully tugs the popcorn bowl out of his lap and sets it on the table where it won’t spill.

Bruce has had to put his dad to bed before, a couple of times. Not so much lately. Tony would probably just wake up if Bruce tried it.

A few hours ago, between films, Tony had said, “So now that you’re sticking around, let me know if there’s anything you want to do.”

Bruce had asked him what he meant. “Well, like…” Tony scratched his head. “You should probably finish school. We can get you enrolled long-distance somewhere. Maybe get you to sit for your GED, do some equivalencies, get you into a college program. Were you thinking anywhere special? I’ve got some pull at MIT. I think I gave them a building or two.”

And while Bruce had been trying to digest that, Tony had added, totally casually, “Also, as soon as I fake some paperwork for you, you’re gonna be insanely rich. So if you’ve got any secret projects shoved in a drawer, a moon base or whatever, that’s totally in the cards.”

“How am I _rich_?” Bruce demanded.

Tony shrugged. “Uh, you’re probably gonna be my heir. I mean, parenthood’s not really… I’m pretty sure you’re gonna be it, in terms of carrying on the Stark legacy. I’ll get a trust fund set up for when you’re older, but in the mean time you’ll have a decent allowance. No pressure, I’m just saying, you can do whatever. Just something to think about.”

Bruce didn’t really hear any of the last half of _Mulan_. Tony just kept eating popcorn, like it was no big deal, while Bruce curled up on the other end of the couch and tried not to breathe too fast.

Was this what Tony meant when he asked Bruce for time? Because this was more than time, this was…

It isn’t the money. It’s more that Tony basically just said he was _adopting_ him. That…wasn’t what Bruce thought Tony meant when he said Bruce could stay.

Bruce doesn’t hate the idea or anything. It’s just a lot to take in. 

When the ending credits to _Wall-E_ start rolling on the screen, Tony is still asleep. Bruce sits in the quiet and the near-dark for a second, then decides that he wants another root beer. They’re in the common room kitchen, so he starts for the door.

“Do you need something, Bruce?” says a quiet voice. It takes him a moment to realize that it’s JARVIS.

“Just a pop,” he says, wondering if JARVIS’s sensor can pick up on the fact that he’s squirming. “Is that okay?”

“Yes,” says JARVIS. “May I inquire whether you are feeling better?”

Bruce touches the wall and lets himself lean into it a little. “Um. Yeah, I guess.” 

He wonders why JARVIS would ask him something like that; maybe it’s just one of Tony’s safety protocols. Then Bruce thinks about the fact that he sort of tricked JARVIS into letting him into Tony’s workshop, and he feels guilty all over again. He hasn’t apologized to anyone yet, not even Tony or Steve. He knows that he should, he just…

“I’m sorry about earlier,” he blurts out.

“I do not understand.”

Maybe if he could always have important conversations in the dark, where he didn’t have to look at anyone, he could just say what he means all the time. “I kind of lied to you.”

“I have not detected inconsistencies or untruths in any of our interactions.”

“You wouldn’t have let me into the workshop if you’d known what I…” 

Apparently even in the dark he still can’t spell it out.

“I see. You are correct. Had I understood your intentions, I would not have complied with your request for access. I am not offended by the deception, however. I am concerned for your well-being.”

“You don’t need to be,” says Bruce.

“I have a sufficient measure of free will to make that determination for myself,” says JARVIS, and Bruce could swear that he was making a joke.

“Okay. Well, thanks.”

“My pleasure, Bruce.” The door of the apartment slides open for him.

Down the hall and up the elevator, Bruce finds the lights on in the common room kitchen. There’s a faint noise, like a bag rattling and a glass being set down. He was hoping he wouldn’t have to see anyone; watching a movie with the whole group was one thing, but he hasn’t been alone with anyone except Tony, and he suspects that people who aren’t Tony might think he needs to talk or whatever. 

He thinks about slipping quietly back down the hall, even if everyone who lives here is a super soldier or a spy and therefore whoever’s in the kitchen probably already know that he’s standing there, hovering like a moron. They might come after him if he leaves, but on second thought, it might not be so awful just to walk in and get his drink and say hi.

He walks around the corner, and Steve is sitting at the bar, his arm buried to the elbow in a bag of Doritos.

Steve smiles, big and bright. “Hey, Bruce,” he says. “Movie marathon over?”

“I guess so. Tony fell asleep.”

“He does that,” Steve nods. “He’ll sleep anywhere except his bed. Like a cat.”

Bruce almost laughs, because he can kind of see that, and he can also picture what Tony’s face would look like if he knew Steve had compared him to a cat.

“Did you need something?” Steve adds.

At home, he never would have just taken something out of the refrigerator without asking. Tony didn’t really seem to care about that sort of thing, but there was something about Steve that made him seem more like an adult than any of the others—especially Tony—even though he was younger than anyone except Bruce. 

“Is it okay if I get something to drink?” he says.

“Yeah, absolutely, help yourself.” But then Steve gets up and walks over to the fridge, his broad shoulders disappearing behind the door. “Uh, there’s milk, chocolate milk, pomegranate juice, orange juice—”

“Um.” Bruce shifts his weight. “Root beer?”

Steve emerges with a bottle. Instead of getting a bottle opener, he pulls the cap off with his fingers. “So, uh. Long day, huh?”

Bruce shrugs.

Steve looks at him a minute, then hands him the bottle and walks back over to his seat at the bar. He uses his foot to pull out the chair next to him, an invitation for Bruce to join him. 

Earlier that day Steve had climbed up the side of a building because he thought Bruce was in danger. Bruce is going to feel guilty about that for a long time, and while it makes it harder to sit next to Steve and drink his pop like everything’s fine, it means that he can’t just walk away from him either. 

He walks over to the bar and climbs up on the stool. Steve shakes some chips out of the bag and into a bowl, which he pushes over towards Bruce. 

“So, about earlier…” Steve smiles crookedly. “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry. I know I must have scared you, grabbing you like that.”

Bruce isn’t hungry, but he stuffs a chip in his mouth to keep from having to answer. 

“When you got sick this morning, I could tell that you were upset, but I guess it was worse than I realized. I’m sorry about that, too. You shouldn’t have had to find out that way.”

“It’s not your fault,” Bruce mumbles, because he doesn’t get why everyone is apologizing to him, when he’s the one who acted like a total head-case.

“Maybe not, but I feel like I could have been more helpful. Hey, it’s okay. We’re good. I just wanted you to know.”

Bruce nods and starts peeling at the damp label on his root beer bottle.

“Mind if I ask how you’re doing?”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay. Good.” Steve is eating the chips out of the bag in giant handfuls. The tips of his fingers come away orange. “You know, before you came up just now, I was sitting here, thinking…I mean, we don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want, but I uh…I’ve kind of been there. I mean, I’ve felt like that.”

Bruce looks up quickly. “Like what?”

Steve shrugs, like he’s embarrassed. “Like there wasn’t much point in sticking around, I guess.”

Stunned, Bruce thinks back over everything he’s ever read about Captain America, everything he’s found out since he got here. “You mean…after they found you?”

Steve shakes his head, grimacing. “No. I mean, that wasn’t much fun, but the Chitauri invasion happened not long afterwards. I didn’t have a lot of time to sit around and feel bad.” He frowns down at his hands and starts wiping them on a napkin. “When I was younger, though, before the war, I was sick all the time. And we were poor. My ma was breaking her back, looking after me all by herself, trying to pay the doctors. I just felt useless, you know? Sometimes, I thought, I probably wasn’t gonna make it anyway, so maybe I should just…you know. Stop trying to get better.” He shrugs. “I hated feeling like a burden. All I wanted was to do some kind of good in the world, but I couldn’t even help myself.”

Bruce’s mouth is really dry. He takes a drink of his root beer.

“I had my mom, of course,” Steve continues. “And my friend Bucky. They never treated me like a burden, and I knew I couldn’t just leave them, not after how hard they worked trying to keep me around.” He smiles sadly. “I guess you didn’t really have anything like that.”

“No, I did, I…” Bruce feels his face getting hot. “My mom, she’s…” 

He hadn’t really been thinking about his mom earlier. Or he had, but he just…if anyone would understand, he thinks she would. She didn’t want him to grow up to be like his father either.

Steve nods. “You love her?”

“Yes.”

“You worried about her?”

Always. Every day. “I don’t know what happened to her,” says Bruce. “I know she’s dead now, but I don’t know if I left her alone when I came here, or if…” 

He’s been thinking about it all afternoon. If Bruce really did leave behind his life in 1982, then his staying here should undo his past—there shouldn’t be a SHIELD file on the Hulk, and Tony shouldn’t have any idea who he is. So he probably didn’t get here by time travel; his past belongs to some other version of himself, and everything that happened, happened.

But what if he’s wrong? What if it was time-travel, and he just hasn’t been here long enough to mess up the future yet? What if Mom really is all alone, waiting for him to back, and Dad is with her, and…

“Can I just say something?” Steve turns a little on his chair so he’s facing Bruce more fully. Bruce glances up at him, just long enough to see how serious he looks, how kind.

“I don’t know how this works,” he says. “And if you did leave your mother behind, I’m sure she’s missing you. But—Bruce, I think she would want you to be here.”

Bruce frowns, not understanding.

“I think,” says Steve carefully, “that if she knew that you were _here_ , with people who care about you and want to look after you, she’d be grateful. Because, here, you’re safe.” He holds Bruce’s gaze for a second. “No one here is ever going to hurt you, or let you get hurt. I think your mother would want that for you.”

Bruce’s hand tightens around his bottle. “I want that for her too.”

Steve’s eyes crease at the corners. “I know, buddy. I wish we could help her. But you can still do something for her. You can let us keep you safe.” Steve looks away for a second. “Sometimes, if you can’t keep going for yourself, you can make yourself keep going for the people who care about you.”

There’s the guilt again, hot and tight in his stomach. It makes him wish he hadn’t drunk his root beer so fast. But it’s not as bad as before. Maybe he’s just getting tired.

Steve lets out a long breath and gets down from his stool, gathering up the bag and the bowl and Bruce’s empty bottle. “It’s getting late. Want me to go wake Tony up so you can have your room back?”

Bruce shakes his head. “It’s okay.” He’s not sure if he’s telling Steve that he can wake Tony up himself, or if he just doesn’t mind Tony crashing on the couch while he sleeps. He’ll decide when he gets back to his room.

“Okay.” Steve’s free hand comes to settle on his shoulder. “I’m really glad you’re okay, Bruce. Sleep tight.”

*

The TV is off when Bruce gets back to his room, but the lights are on low—just bright enough for Bruce to see, not bright enough to wake Tony up. He seems to be sleeping pretty hard. Bruce watches him a second, then pulls the blanket off the back of the couch and drapes it over him.

He takes his pajamas to the bathroom and shuts the door, then turns to face the mirror. He doesn’t really like mirrors; he’s not sure why, he just never has. 

Bruce loads his toothbrush with toothpaste and turns his back to the sink while he brushes. He must be way more tired than he realized, because it’s hard to keep on his feet suddenly; his legs feel really heavy, and his face feels sort of numb, almost like pins and needles.

Tomorrow, he thinks, he should do something to try and make up for all the trouble he caused everyone today. He doesn’t know what he could do, but he’ll think of something. Maybe he’ll ask JARVIS for ideas. Maybe he’ll start thinking about college—the idea of skipping the rest of high school is _unbelievably_ exciting, and he always wanted to go to Harvard, just because it would piss his dad off. But MIT let Tony in when he was fourteen; maybe Bruce could think about engineering. He didn’t _have_ to be a physicist. He could learn new stuff.

Bruce spits and rinses his toothbrush. He reaches for his pajamas, folded up on the corner of the sink, and without warning his vision doubles, then blurs. He misses the sink and lurches into the wall, bumping his broken nose.

He’s really dizzy. Bruce knows from experience that he needs to sit down before he falls and cracks his head. He just needs to get his head between his knees and he’ll be fine, probably. This kind of thing has happened to him before, and he was fine.

“Bruce?” says JARVIS, sounding concerned. “Are you unwell?”

Bruce had forgotten that JARVIS was monitoring him. He’d forgotten that he wasn’t alone, that this didn’t have to be a secret. He’d forgotten he could ask for help.

He opens his mouth to ask JARVIS to called Tony, but then he’s sliding down the wall, falling to his hands and knees. The rug in front of the bath tub is thick and soft underneath him, protecting him from the cold tile floor. It’s okay that he can’t speak; JARVIS must have already called for help, because Bruce thinks he can hear someone talking—or lots of people, talking all at once, from far away.

Bruce knows that he’s about to pass out, but for once he isn’t scared. Even as his eyes close, he knows that someone will be here soon, and it will be fine. He’ll be fine.

*

When Bruce wakes up he’s lying on the floor. The light is too bright. He touches his forehead, and his clumsy fingers knock his glasses askew on his nose.

His first thought is the same as always: _Oh God, not again._

His second is: _What the hell am I wearing?_

Since the accident, he’s woken up naked more times than he can count; this is the first time he’s ever woken up wearing clothes that feel painfully constricting and _small._

Behind him, the door bursts open. Bruce moves on pure instinct: he rolls and comes up in a crouch, facing the intruder. That’s when he sees Tony, standing over him, his expression stunned and his eyes a little wild.

Bruce feels a wave of pure relief at the sight of his friend; then their eyes lock, and Bruce remembers. “Oh my God,” he says in a faint voice, and promptly collapses against the side of the bath tub.

“Bruce.” Tony takes a hesitant step towards him. Then he pitches himself forward, sliding across the tiles on his knees. He grabs Bruce’s shoulders, the points of his fingers digging into his muscles. “ _Bruce_.”

“It wasn’t me,” Bruce says, dazed. “Jane and I, we weren’t…I don’t know what happened, we weren’t working on anything that should have…”

“Are you okay?” Tony’s voice is tight, tense, barely controlled.

Bruce takes stock: physically, nothing hurts, except in the ways that all middle-aged bodies hurt, ways he wouldn’t even have noticed if not for the fact that he can clearly remember how it felt to inhabit a body that was so much newer than his own. Mentally, he can perceive the presence of the other guy; he’s grumpily bewildered by the turn of events, but content to let Bruce deal with the situation.

Emotionally, he’s…

Bruce looks back at Tony. Now that he’s searching for it, he can see the strain in his face, the evidence of the helplessness and anger and fear that’s been battering at him at him for the last three days. He looks worse than he did after the Chitauri invasion, but somehow he’s looking at _Bruce_ like Bruce is the one who’s been mortally wounded.

Humiliation settles over him, a queasy feeling of exposure that makes Bruce want to drag the shower curtain off its rings and curl up inside it like a blanket. 

Bruce had a therapist once; he’d agreed to see her at Betty’s insistence, because he loved Betty and he wanted to make her happy. But he’d known it wouldn’t do any good, and he’d been right, because the therapist kept asking him these useless questions, like _try to picture the child that you were back then; can you feel any compassion for him?_

Bruce couldn’t. He has never felt anything but impatience with his own vulnerability; when he looks in the mirror he sees only weakness, a frailty that he badly wants to crush.

Belatedly, he realizes that Tony is waiting for an answer to his question. 

“I’m okay,” he says.

Tony is still holding his shoulders like he thinks Bruce will evaporate without the touch to ground him. He doesn’t let go, and he doesn’t look convinced.

“Really,” Bruce says lamely. “I promise, I’m fresh out of suicidal impulses.” 

Tony sucks air between his teeth. “Not funny.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you?” Tony demands. Slowly, like it costs him something, he takes his hands off Bruce’s shoulders and sinks back onto the floor.

Bruce blinks against the bright bathroom light. He takes his glasses off; like his clothes, they’re too small, and they’re digging grooves behind his ears.

“I’m sorry you had to deal with me like that,” he says, because it’s just about the only completely honest thing he can say right now. “I was…kind of a mess.”

A muscle jumps in Tony’s jaw. Then he looks away, scratching at the back of his neck. “I was going to adopt you.”

Bruce winces. “I remember.”

“Oh, you don’t like that? Are you embarrassed?” Something hot and dark blossoms in Tony’s eyes. “Too fucking bad. I’d do it again. I was gonna build a time machine too; I _really_ wanted to meet your dad.”

“I’m…pretty sure you don’t actually know how to build a time machine.”

“When I was done with him, he never would have laid a hand on you again. On account of not having hands.”

Bruce feels a rush of tenderness that is momentarily stronger than the humiliation. He knows that Tony means every word; he remembers what Tony’s protectiveness meant to him as a child, and as much as he wants to pretend otherwise, it means a lot to him now. 

“I’m not twelve anymore,” he says gently. “I’m fine now; it was all a long time ago.”

“Bruce.” Tony looks at him like he thinks Bruce might be a little stupid. “No it wasn’t.”

Bruce jerks his head aside, unable to break the eye contact any other way.

“Okay. This is insane, and we’ll, you know, have a lot of fun banging our heads against the whole problem of _how the fuck_ you just spent three days as a twelve year old, but I got to ask you something first. This is important.”

Somehow, he knows exactly what Tony is about to say, but there’s nothing he can do about it; he’s exhausted and bewildered and Tony is in between him and the door. There’s no escape.

“Do you remember what I said to you? In the workshop? About how I wasn’t going to keep your here against your will?” Tony doesn’t wait for a reply. “Are you here against your will, Bruce? If it weren’t for Hulk, would you be making a break for the roof again?”

Bruce forgets how to breathe for a second. 

They don’t ask each other these kinds of questions, as a rule. Tony left it alone after Bruce admitted to shooting himself a few years back. In turn, Bruce has never asked Tony what the hell he was thinking during the palladium poisoning incident. They poke at each other, but always in good humor; they don’t deliberately pick at each other’s scabs like this.

It takes Bruce a second to realize that Tony isn’t doing that. It’s not Bruce’s wounds that he’s picking at; it’s his own, and these particular wounds are partially Bruce’s doing. 

Tony doesn’t have a lot of friends; when they’re hurt or in danger, he goes a little crazy. It probably goes double when they try to hurt themselves.

Bruce is fine now, really, but he still doesn’t want to look at Tony. He has to, though. Tony deserves better from him than for Bruce to look away when he’s in pain. Deep down, Bruce doesn’t really understand why Tony should be in pain because of this, but it’s obvious, listening to him, that he is.

“I just want to know,” Tony says, and Bruce looks at the shrapnel scarring on his left cheek. “Are you trapped? Is this whole world just one big cage to you?” 

Bruce tries to shake his head, but only succeeds in twitching his shoulders slightly. Tony slides a little closer to him; Bruce wants to draw back, but he can’t move.

“Did you try again, when you were a kid? Are you sorry? Do you regret—” Tony’s mouth twists; Bruce watches the muscles of his face contort in a mirthless smile. “Do you really feel like all the good you’ve done, all the people you’ve helped, all the people who care about you—is that not enough? Hmm?” Tony leans in. “Answer me.”

He wants to deny it, even though that would be less than the whole truth. He wants, at least, to tell Tony that it has nothing to do with Tony not being enough for him. 

He wants to believe it’s not his fault that Tony takes everything so goddamn personally.

“When you were twelve,” Tony continues, and he’s absolutely relentless, Bruce feels like a man facing a firing squad, “When you read that file and found out what kind of man you grew up to be, it kind of seemed like you thought you’d be better off dead. I want to know. Do you still feel that way? Has your whole life been a waste, Bruce? Look at me. Tell me the truth.”

Bruce is looking at him, as best he can manage. It’s not like he can back away. He’s pressed up against the edge of the bath tub already; Tony is in between him and the door, and there’s nowhere for him to go.

“I want to know—”

“Tony, could we not—”

“—if you’re just marking the days until you can figure out how to die, Bruce. ‘Cause I know you think you can’t, but you’re a genius. You’ll figure it out eventually. You know, if that’s what you want.” Tony’s voice is light and utterly casual as he thrusts the blade home. “Is that what you want?” 

He can feel Tony’s gaze bearing down on him like a laser, singing and snapping the last threads of his composure.

“C’mon, Banner. It’s a simple question. Do you want to die? Because, so help me, I was lying when I said you had a—”

“Will you just _stop_?” 

Bruce surges forward and grabs Tony by the shoulders. For a split second, he imagines knocking Tony back against the sink, cracking his head open, smearing his blood over the gleaming tiles. It has nothing to do with the other guy; there isn’t a hint of emerald in his vision. This is all him, this vicious craving.

Instead, he tightens his grip on Tony’s arms and gives him a brief, frustrated shake. He uses more force than he means to, and Tony nearly loses his balance, except that Bruce is still holding onto him.

“Jesus Christ,” Bruce breathes. His head droops a little; his eyes are level with Tony’s chest, where the arc reactor used to be. 

Bruce had helped him with that. Tony had no choice but to go under full anesthesia for the procedure, so he couldn’t supervise the medical team during the extraction. That had been difficult for Tony; he didn’t really trust the medical team to understand the complexities of his technology, and while he hadn’t said it in so many words, he didn’t really trust the doctors to make sure the reactor was secure afterwards, either. So Bruce had stood in his place. The only other option was Pepper, who had been busy undergoing treatment for Extremis. 

That had been a whole different nightmare. Tony couldn’t be as involved in Pepper’s treatment as he’d wanted while he was recovering from major cardio-thoracic surgery, and he’d kept pushing himself past his physical limits, elevating his stress to a level not even beta blockers could manage. The only way Bruce could stop him was to step in and take over Pepper’s care as well, so he’d done that. He’d been a little surprised that Tony had let him, but he had.

It strikes Bruce that he owes Tony, for a lot of things, but probably what he owes him for the most is the breathtaking level of trust Tony places in him.

Tony had talked to him about trust a lot when he was twelve. Only now does it occur to Bruce that the reason Tony knew how to explain trust to a child who’d never trusted anyone was because he’d only recently figured out how to do it himself.

Taking a deep breath, Bruce lifts his head and looks Tony in the eyes.

“The answer is yes,” he says. “I tried when I was sixteen. Yes, I regretted that it didn’t work, for a long time afterwards. Especially after the accident. I couldn’t—I’d hurt Betty, and I just thought, if she’d never met me, she never would have…”

Tony’s mouth is a thin, immovable line, but he doesn’t interrupt.

“But I don’t—I’m not sorry to be alive.” 

Of all the secrets Tony has learned about him recently, it’s parting with this one feels that makes Bruce feel like he’s giving away a piece of himself. Humiliation is one thing; this is _shame._

“I feel like I should be sorry. I feel like, if I was a good person, I wouldn’t want—it’s not an easy thing to admit, to anyone. To myself. But.” Bruce takes a deep breath. “Things are so different now. I’m better. I’m…” Bruce casts around for a word that will summarize his state of being. “I’m _here_.”

Tony looks furious, Bruce thinks. The lines around his mouth and eyes are white, like scars, and his eyes are brilliant, piercing, and dark.

He flinches when Tony grabs him. Some instincts, he’s never going to lose. But Tony ignores it; he throws an arm around Bruce’s neck like he’s wrestling him into a chokehold, and only when he’s dragged Bruce down against his chest does his grip become something other than crushing.

Some men, Bruce reflects, are vicious in disappointment; Tony is at his least restrained when he’s _relieved._

Bruce waits until he feels the frantic beating of Tony’s heart grow slow and calm beneath him before he speaks again. “I can’t believe you tried to send me to MIT. That was low, Tony.”

Tony’s laugh explodes into Bruce’s hair, ruffling it, warming his scalp. “What’s wrong, Harvard, MIT not good enough for you?”

Bruce smiles invisibly against Tony’s shoulder. “I would have loved it,” he says. 

Tony’s hand tightens against the back of Bruce’s neck, and somehow Bruce knows that Tony understands what he’s really trying to say. 

He knows that Tony’s never going to have children; he understands why, and he doesn’t blame him. Even so, Bruce can’t help thinking it’s sort of a shame.

“C’mon.” Tony lets him go, slowly, and when he’s facing Bruce again he doesn’t bother drying his eyes. “Bet you’re hungry.”

“Oh my god, so hungry.”

“Figures. Let’s go wake Steve up so he can see how much you’ve grown.”

Tony gets to his feet. Bruce looks up at him, and for an instant the deja vu is dizzying.

Then Tony offers him a hand; Bruce takes it, and the world settles back to normal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much, to everyone who commented; I'll try to get around to replying this week. :)


End file.
